A critic cooks: Fay Maschler serves potter's peppery stew

A relaxing change: the stew is a simple one, with a restrained list of ingredients
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Fay Maschler10 June 2020

I’m sated by cookery books. Even weeks of lockdown kitchen labour haven’t made much impression on the shelves of ideas that are beginning to act like reprimands. But I’ve yet to meet anyone truly galvanized by this version of porridge that we are currently going through.

Some time ago a chef friend gave me a copy of Beaneaters & Bread Soup (Quadrille). It is the work of ace photographer Jason Lowe and his wife, the mellifluously named Lori De Mori, that they published three years before opening The Towpath Café on Regent’s Canal in Hackney or “the Haggerston Riviera” as someone memorably described it.

The Towpath Café, which in some respects – Italian inspiration, dedication to top-tier ingredients, elegant simplicity, an American woman one of the creators, staff treated as family, an ethos of mucking in, proximity to water – could be called the East End canal version of the west London River Café, is temporarily closed. With luck it will re-open soon coinciding with mellow weather. There is no website, bookings are not taken; it is just a serendipitous find when out walking or, if you must, jogging or cycling.

Jason and Lori have a house in the Tuscan hills. Descriptions and photographs of the artisans and culinary traditions of the area are the fabric of this cookery book. Sensual scents are released as you leaf through the pages. Dishes beg to be tried, tickets to be booked (fingers crossed), craftsmen in terracotta like their friend Mario Mariani to be visited in the hopes that an invitation to dinner is forthcoming, when a stew like this one might be cooked in the fading heat of his kiln. Here, on a prosaic stove it is almost as good and, with its restrained list of ingredients, a relaxing change from the everything but the kitchen sink approach to making a dish.

Potter's peppery stew

Time to prepare and cook: 3 hours 10 minutes

You will need: shin of beef, garlic, black pepper, tomato puree, red wine.

Method

  • Cut about a kilo of beef into chunks and place in a large heavy-based flameproof casserole.
  • Peel and crush six garlic cloves. Add them to the meat along with four tablespoons tomato puree, a tablespoon of freshly ground black pepper, a pinch of salt.
  • Pour in about one third of a bottle of red table wine and enough water to barely cover the meat.
  • Mix well and simmer uncovered extremely gently for three hours or so, until the meat is meltingly tender and the juices reduced to a whisper.
  • Great with mash but perhaps even better with crushed celeriac or sweet potato or Jerusalem artichokes. For true easiness, make this one evening and eat it the next.

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