Making the bœuf bourguignon

Instead of marinating the beef in red wine with onions, carrots, garlic, and thyme, which many recipes call for doing, I decided to coat the meat with black pepper, a little bit of ground allspice, and litle bit of smoked, spicy paprika as a dry marinade, and let it rest for an hour. (Some recipes say it's not good to use a liquid marinade because you want the meat to be as dry as possible when you brown it.)

Next, slice an onion, crush some garlic, and fry those in a pan with some smoked pork lardons (bacon). Sprinkle a tablespoon of flour over the onions and lardons let it brown as they fry. Finally, put that mixture in the pot with the the browned beef, a cut up carrot or two, most of a bottle of dry red wine, and a splash of cognac. The liquid should just barely cover the beef and onion mixture and the flour will thicken it as it comes to a boil. Put the pot on low heat and add wine or water as needed or desired while it cooks for two or three hours.

Here's what the meat looked like after it was seared and browned in the pot. One funny thing is that in the two 1970s-era cookbooks I referred to in making this bourguignon — Monique Maine's Cuisine pour toute l'année and Ginette Mathiot's Je sais cuisiner, the two recipes are very similar, even though one never mentions onions and the other never mentions carrots. Most Beef Burgundy recipes call for both.

And here's the finished bœuf bourguignon, served with linguine and wax beans (haricots beurre). You can substitute green beans or another green vegetable as you like or want. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that you can add sliced mushrooms to the stew toward the end of the cooking time.