I’ve gotten mildly fixated on perfecting my Carbonades Flamandes or stoofvlees. Belgian restaurants are not exactly common; so it’s challenging to find commercial examples to index off of. Modern recipes tend to have certain key features in common but also vary significantly in the details. I suspect it’s rather like gumbo — there are as many recipes for gumbo as there are Cajuns cooking it (not to mention the Creoles). But I found an old cookbook on Project Gutenberg that offers some interesting historical examples. In contrast to the recipes I find in modern cookbooks and online, none involve marinades or flouring the beef before browning or adding sweeteners.
The following are from The Belgian Cookbook, a collection of recipes from Belgian refugees in Britain edited by Mrs. Brian Luck, published in 1915, and now in the public domain in the US.
FLEMISH CARBONADE
Put two onions to color in butter or in hot fat. Then add to them the beef, which you have cut into pieces the size of a small cake. Let it cook for a few minutes, then add pepper, salt, a carrot sliced, and enough water to allow the meat to cook gently by the side of the fire, allowing one and one-half hours for one and one-half pounds of meat. Ten minutes before serving add to the sauce a little meat-juice or Liebig [probably Liebig’s Extract of Meat]. You may at the same time, if it is wished, cook potatoes with the meat for about twenty minutes. Serve it all in a large dish, the meat in the center and the potatoes round. The sauce is served separately, and without being passed through the sieve.
L. Verhaeghe.
FLEMISH CARBONADES
Take four pounds of beef—there is a cut near the neck that is suitable for this recipe. Cut the meat in small pieces (square) and fry them in a pan. In another pan put a piece of refined fat and fry in it five big onions that you have finely chopped. When these are well browned, add to them the meat, sprinkling in also pepper, salt, mixed herbs. Cover all with water, and let it cook for an hour with the lid on. After an hour’s cooking, add half a glass of beer, a slice of crumb of bread with a light layer of mustard and three tablespoonfuls of best vinegar. Let it cook again for three quarters of an hour. If the sauce is not thick enough, add a little flour, taking care that it boils up again afterwards.
CARBONADES DONE WITH BEER
Cut the meat into slices that are thin rather than thick. Mince two big onions and fry them till brown; then fry the slices till they are colored on both sides. Pour on them first some beer, then a dash of vinegar, adding thyme, pepper, and salt, and throw in also a slice of crust of bread, which you have spread with mustard. Let this all simmer for three hours.
Mme. Segur.
CARBONADE OF FLANDERS
Cut your beef into small neat pieces. Mince some onions finely, and for five or six people you would add two bay-leaves, two cloves, pepper, salt; simmer gently for three hours in water, and at the end of that time bind the sauce with cornflour. Some people like the sauce to be thickened instead with mustard.
V. Verachtert.
CHIPPED POTATOES
Take some long-shaped potatoes, peel them and smooth them with the knife. Cut them into very thin rounds. Heat the grease pretty hot, dry the slices of potato with a cloth, put them into the frying basket and plunge them into the fat. When they are colored, take the basket out, let the fat heat up again to a slightly higher temperature, and re-plunge the basket, so that the slices become quite crisp. Serve with coarse salt sprinkled over.
