Stroganoff. The taste of hospitality that went around the world

Beef Stroganoff is a small epic of civilisation served in sauce. A tale of aristocrats and poor students, of French finesse and Russian generosity, of a cuisine that managed to leave the palace, cross the borders of empires and settle on the tables of the world. Legend leads to the Odessa residence of Count Alexander Stroganov. There he kept his famous open tables, at which a suitably dressed newcomer could be given a meal. Students lent one another a decent frock coat so they could cross the palace threshold in turns, and the cooks, recognising the ruse, turned a blind eye. There is more truth about culture in this anecdote than in many a treatise. Goodness begins when the rule makes way for the person. The dish was meant to be elegant, tasty, easy to share and possible to serve to many guests. The French technique of frying meat met the Russian custom of wrapping it in sauce. The result was a dish of double nature. Refined, yet hospitable; aristocratic, yet made for the shared table. The first known recipe was written down in 1871. It was austere and frugal: beef, broth, mustard, sour cream. No mushrooms, peppers or tomatoes, which later grew so lushly over the European imagination. Over time Stroganoff began to live like a myth — every culture took its core and gave it its own accent. In the United States it came to rest on broad noodles, in Brazil it met rice, ketchup and crunchy potato sticks, in the North it took the form of a humble sausage dish, and in Poland it turned into a thick, spicy wedding soup, served at night, when the music does not stop and the revellers need their strength restored. This is how culture works. It does not preserve forms in amber. It melts them down, seasons them, Polonises them, simplifies or ennobles them. Tradition lives not because it remains untouched, but because successive communities recognise a place for themselves in it. Stroganoff carries a story about the perversity of memory. It managed to reach space as a meal for Soviet and Russian cosmonauts, and at the same time to land at the centre of a debate about sexism, when the obituary of the outstanding engineer Yvonne Brill opened with praise of her culinary talent, pushing her scientific achievements behind the smell of a home-cooked dinner. The dish has held a palace, poverty, invention, migration, scandal and a journey beyond the Earth. The meaning remains simple. The table is the first institution of a community. At it, the stranger becomes a guest, the guest an interlocutor, and the interlocutor a participant in the world. "At Stroganov's you will feed both mind and body," they used to say in Odessa. That sentence contains an aesthetics of goodness. Goodness is not a decoration of life. It is its most perfect flavour. It joins people together, and out of people it makes a common good. ## Three counts and one pot The name leads to one of the richest families in Russian history, but which Stroganov fathered the dish, historians still argue. Most often the credit goes to Count Alexander Grigorievich Stroganov, who lived from 1795 to 1891, Governor-General of New Russia and Bessarabia, and who cultivated in Odessa the tradition of open tables, otkrytye stoly. Any decently dressed and educated person could walk in from the street to his residence and eat a free dinner. His French cook, sometimes identified as André Dupont, invented for these occasions a dish that was cheap, tasty, impressive and easy to portion. He combined the French technique of frying meat with the Russian habit of serving the sauce together with the dish rather than separately. A second legend points to the diplomat Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov, who lived from 1774 to 1817. In Siberia the meat froze so hard that the cook could only manage to cut it into very thin strips. The third version is geriatric. One of the counts, perhaps Grigory Alexandrovich, lost all his teeth in old age and could not chew steak, so the cook cut the tenderloin into delicate strips and bathed them in creamy sauce. Three legends, three reasons: hospitality, frost and toothlessness. Each says something true about cooking. A cook is always solving somebody's problem. The family was so rich that it entered a proverb: "You will never be richer than Stroganov, and you will die all the same." With that sentence Russian folklore reminds us that wealth does not exempt anyone from mortality. Odessa remembered another side of the same wealth. Students, artists and the intelligentsia came to the free dinners, and the discussions at the table never ended. Wealth that opens doors leaves better proverbs behind than wealth that keeps them shut. ## The recipe before the recipe The first printed recipe appeared in 1871 in Elena Molokhovets's famous handbook "A Gift to Young Housewives". There the dish was called "beef à la Stroganov, with mustard". The beef was cut into cubes, not strips, and dusted with salt and allspice. The sauce was made from a roux, beef broth, prepared mustard and a little sour cream. There was no onion, no mushrooms, no peppers, no tomatoes and no alcohol. Onion and tomato purée were added only by a recipe from 1912. In 1891 the French cook Charles Brière, working in St Petersburg, submitted a recipe for beef Stroganoff to the French magazine "L'Art Culinaire". In the West he was long regarded as its inventor. Russian culinary elites and historians replied that a dish under that name had existed in homes and cookbooks long before him, and that the Frenchman had at most given it a facelift, adding, for example, mushrooms and dousing the whole thing with wine or cognac. Disputes over the authorship of a recipe are a permanent feature of cooking. Rarely does anyone ask the opinion of the cook who made it first. ## Golden rules The classic version requires beef tenderloin, filet mignon. Today good sirloin or topside is allowed. The meat is cut across the grain into thin batons of about 1 by 3 cm, because only then will it not be rubbery. A dusting of flour before frying protects the juices and helps thicken the sauce. The most important thing is the heat. The meat is fried in extremely hot clarified butter or oil, very briefly, two or three minutes at most, and in small batches. It must seal quickly and stay pink inside. Whoever throws in too much at once will lower the temperature; the meat will release its juice, start to boil and turn into a rubber sole. Sour cream, in turn, tends to curdle in heat and acid, so before it is poured in it is tempered with warm sauce from the pan. Odessa cooks summed it up in a single sentence: fry the beef briefly, keep its pink heart, and never let the cream curdle. In Russia the most prized side dish was matchstick potatoes, kartofel pai, very thin, crisp chips fried in deep fat, or smooth mashed potatoes. Pickled cucumbers on the side. Russian purists consider mushrooms a profanation and an American simplification. A Pole who cannot imagine Stroganoff without button mushrooms may take offence at this point. He has every right, because his version has a history of its own by now. ## Emigration with sauce After the revolution of 1917 the fleeing aristocrats, the White Russians, took the recipe to China, mainly to Harbin and Shanghai. From there, through American soldiers stationed in Asia, the dish reached the USA and went on around the world. In China it was served without sour cream, with soy sauce. In Japan the sauce is enriched with demi-glace and served with rice as a variation on hayashi rice. America in the 1950s and 60s simplified everything it could. The beef lands on broad egg noodles, and the cream sauce is often replaced by a tin of condensed mushroom soup mixed with sour cream. Brazil made Stroganoff an everyday dish, strogonoff de carne or with chicken, strogonoff de frango, made with sweet cream, ketchup and mustard, sometimes with corn, served with white rice and batata palha, crunchy potato sticks. Sweden and Finland swapped the beef for cheap falukorv sausage. Korv-stroganoff and makkarastroganoff are budget classics of school canteens. Poland went furthest. Here Stroganoff became a spicy goulash soup, thinner than the original, with sweet and hot paprika, tomato purée, button mushrooms and, obligatorily, pickled cucumber cut into batons. It is served at weddings and banquets late at night, when guests need their strength restored. The count fed students so they could talk. Poland feeds wedding guests so they can dance. The goal is the same: that no one should leave the table earlier than they ought to. ## Orbit and obituary A thick sauce holds pieces of meat well, so Stroganoff became a full meal for Soviet and Russian cosmonauts. Freeze-dried, in tubes and later in vacuum tins, it travelled to the Salyut and Mir stations and to the International Space Station. The dish from the open tables of Odessa made the longest journey hospitality can make. In March 2013 Yvonne Brill died, a Canadian-American pioneer of space engineering and inventor of the electrothermal hydrazine thruster, crucial for keeping telecommunications satellites in orbit. One of the most prestigious American dailies began her obituary by saying that she made a mean stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off to raise her children. A storm broke out, and the editors quickly changed the text and moved the mention of stroganoff deeper into the article. The woman thanks to whom satellites stay in orbit was to be remembered for a pot. Stroganoff flew into space before her achievements reached the first paragraph. ## Recipe **Ingredients:** - beef tenderloin (or good sirloin or topside) - salt and allspice - flour - clarified butter or oil - roux - beef broth - prepared mustard - sour cream - to serve: matchstick potatoes or mashed potatoes, pickled cucumbers **Method:** 1. Cut the meat across the grain into thin batons of about 1 by 3 cm. Season with salt and allspice and dust with flour. 2. Heat the clarified butter or oil until very hot. Fry the meat in small batches, 2–3 minutes at most, so that it stays pink inside. 3. Make a sauce from the roux, beef broth and mustard. 4. Temper the sour cream with warm sauce from the pan, and only then pour it into the sauce. 5. Combine the meat with the sauce and serve with matchstick potatoes or mash, with pickled cucumbers on the side.