Slow-Braised Beef Stew

I was thinking the other day, “I’d like some homemade beef stew like mom used to make. Except, you know, good.”  Jan did not shine in the kitchen.  Her recipes were not recipes anybody would greet with delighted expectation.

It's a strange feeling when you order a dish as an adult at a restaurant that your parents used to make while proclaiming something like, “No one made spaghetti like my mother,” and then slowly realize that it's true no one made it like her; they make it better. Suddenly, you're not sure about your father's burgers. We have blind spots when it comes to our childhood comfort foods.

Believing that your parents were the greatest cooks in the world is only natural, and for years, I was utterly convinced that all my childhood meals were worthy of three Michelin stars. This worldview is similar to being told you're the “most beautiful girl in the world,” an assertion that seemed true until I attended junior high school and realized I, well, wasn’t.

My mother was not domestic. As my sisters and I grew older, we joked that the best thing my mother knew how to make was reservations. However when birthdays rolled around and she asked if we wanted her to make dinner, it did come in handy. Memories of childhood and the big pot that came out occasionally to make homemade chili or spaghetti sauce (noodles served separately – always!) were very rare and usually reserved for special occasions.

While my grandmother was amazing in the kitchen (and truth be told, also at completing her daughter’s homework), my mother was too busy fighting boys on and off the basketball court. She wasn’t interested in decorating our bedroom, sewing us dresses, or braiding our hair; however, her ability to juggle being president of the PTA, and coaching every sports team, while finding time to carpool all the neighborhood kids to and from the YMCA was, and still is, impressive. Even long after the house was empty and our ballet slippers were outgrown, she still reported every year to volunteer for dance recital duties.

It’s not like she had time to scan through Gourmet Magazine or whisk a cream sauce.  The woman was exhausted 24/7 with me and my sisters, fighting, screaming, and pulling hair (what little we had). She kept us alive, even if she looked suspiciously at anything that came from a cookbook or required a spice beyond salt and pepper.  And yet, even with the memory of soggy string beans and overcooked meat, now and then, I start to crave the food of my childhood.

Which brings me back to her Beef Stew.  The problem with messing with a remembered recipe is that it doesn’t taste like you remembered it.  On the other hand, my mother’s Beef Stew was a mixed memory, so what I had to do was isolate the good stuff.  Good Beef Stew should be deep rich brown, unlike our pale living room carpet (which we were never allowed to walk on.)

This is one of the big ah-ha moments from the months-long experiment I’ve been making with my soup series:  There are basically only about a dozen recipes in the world (cooking, not baking) and everything is just a variation on those.  Meat with pan sauce, stir fry, stew, oven-roasted vegetables, you can change some of the ingredients, but it’s pretty much the same recipes over and over again.  So, my mother wasn’t that far off the path with her basic repertoire.

I could see where my mother’s habit of tossing in a can of Campbell’s beef broth and hoping for the best was not going to cut it.  Neither was dumping all the veggies into the broth and boiling the hell out of them with the meat.  I have some standards.  If I tried to follow her recipe as remembered, I know I'd end up with more Beef Memory than Beef Stew and a whole lot of empty vegetable cans in the trash to boot.

Even though my stew tasted completely different from my mother’s, it still made me think of watching black and white TV, the knotty pine cabinets in our old kitchen and that pale carpet in the living room while wondering how she was able to do all the things she did do so well. I’m exhausted even thinking about it. Jan, if you are reading this (and I know you are), ultimately, it didn’t matter to me that your cooking was bad. You still became the greatest mom.