It was sort of a rash decision on my part to prepare boef à la bourguignonne, and since my bank account was still in the red and because I did not have an army to feed, I did what any graduate student of economics would do: I minimized costs in an effort to maximize the returns to my endeavor. I calculated that with the year-old half-pound lean cut of stew meat I already had in my freezer, I could just pick up another half-pound or so of a fattier cut from the co-op in order to yield the quantity of beef that Judith Jones calls for in a single serving of said dish. After all, I already had plenty of bacon and the requisite garnitures. It’s also worth noting that I prided myself on recognizing that using a fattier cut of meat would make a better stew. Score! I was going to get away with preparing a dish worthy of serving to our beloved President Obama for a mere $8. As a budding economist, I also prided myself on noting that the cost of the year-old meat and garnitures were sunk costs and ought not be included when calculating the marginal cost of last night’s dinner. As if you care.
Well, what Judith Jones, James Peterson, and Julia Child don’t assume is that their reader is an idiotic recovering vegan who doesn’t recognize the inherent problems associated with combining fatty and lean cuts of beef in a dish at the same point in the cooking process. So they don’t warn you that your garnitures (translation: pearl onions, mushrooms, and whatever other veggies you might throw in when the stew is nearly done cooking) will break down into mush before the lean cubes of meat lose any of their toughness, and the fattier chunks of meat are nearly tender enough to fall apart from the tap of a wooden spoon. Ah, the sheer frustration of being a dumb broad when it comes to cooking meat.
I will note that I did possess enough intelligence to pull out the garniture before its inevitable disintegration, since graduate students of applied economics must be smart because they have to take a lot of hard math courses and use weird Lagrangian equations to solve maximization problems. See, I must be really smart because I understand what I just wrote. Do you? Anyway, after my friend Heather came over in anticipation of being served a delicious snack of boef à la bourguignonne upon her arrival, she proceeded to poke and prod the meat, informing me that the lean chunks would not be tender for another couple of hours. Hours? WTF?! We decided to eat the stew anyway, avoided the tough chunks of meat, and blabbed on about what girlfriends blab on about until around one in the morning. As she was leaving, we made a date to begin a meat-education course for me on Sunday. I think that she’s going to show me how to roast a chicken or something. Cool! I’ve never done that.
Despite the fact that half of the meat was virtually inedible, the rest of the boef à la bourguignonne was fabulous! I even licked the wooden spoon and my fingers after scraping them around the pot's inner surfaces. Seriously, I don’t lick spoons or fingers that are covered in meat juice—spoons and fingers are normally only meant to be licked if they are covered in cookie dough—but this was so damn good that I couldn’t help it. I will be making boef à la bourguignonne again someday soon, though next time I will be smart enough to use only a fatty cut of beef.
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