Braised Short Ribs

Braised Short Ribs belong to the important family of stews, braises, and daubes, those  heartily earthy dishes of winter. In this discussion, the term “stew” is synonymous with “braise,” signifying a dish requiring long, slow cooking, usually in a low oven.

My passion for braising began in grad school, while reading Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking. Esther Colwin Snellenberger’s Extremely Easy Beef Stew became one of the first dishes I successfully prepared. Young, new to cooking, I didn’t understand myself in the nascent grip of obsession.

I must have made that stew ten thousand times, give or take: it was excellent food for starving graduate students. I threw everything into the Crock-Pot without bothering to brown the meat or flame the wine or reduce the sauce. For a long time this was perfectly fine. We ate it weekly, in all weathers. We were young, poor, and very hungry.

Change came incrementally. From Molly Stevens’s All About Braising, I learned about “building” stews. I realized browning was not an optional step. Judy Rodgers’s indispensable Zuni Café Cookbook taught me the value of pre-salting meats. I studied Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking Of Southwest France, read Alice Waters, Richard Olney, and Elizabeth David. Tamasin Day-Lewis, Jane Grigson, and Molly O’Neill were critical teachers. So was Mollie Katzen, whose cookbooks deliver an excellent education in kitchen fundamentals.

We finished graduate school and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Crock-Pot remained in heavy use, but I began branching out, buying chuck roasts, which I sliced myself. Home-canned tomatoes supplanted store-bought. The meat was pre-salted and seared, the pan deglazed with red wine. Then the vegetables, carefully pared and cut, had their turn around the sauté pan before landing in the pot, in time a French enameled cast iron behemoth more expensive than my wedding dress.

It was about this time, in the late 90’s, that I, along with the rest of the meat-eating world, discovered the short rib. Their cost soared from affordable to impossible, making them an occasional cold weather splurge.

Gradually, these basic stews and braises acquired depth. Meat, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, and red wine now received additions: a rinsed anchovy, a splash of cognac, homemade chicken broth. I added mushrooms, black olives, or a sliver of orange peel. A little Armagnac. Canned tomatoes gave way to home-canned, while the tomato paste, always tasting faintly of the tin it came in, was replaced by tubes of heartstoppingly expensive Italian stuff.

The first time I browned the meat, my fiancé, now my husband, looked up sharply and asked what I’d done differently. Surprised, I explained. There was no returning to my former lazy ways.

The quantum leap came with pork. I was not raised in a kosher household, just a porkless one. Yet all those compelling French recipes, the daubes and ragouts and cassoulets, ask for bits of belly or hock or bacon. Initially wary, I added whatever was around, usually the ham or pancetta kept for sandwiches. Over time my courage grew. I began buying squares of fatty salt pork and uncured bacon. Finally I nerved up and bought pig’s feet.

I looked at the pig’s feet every time I went shopping. There they were, helpfully sawed in half, packaged in neat sets. They were laid out beside pork necks, meaty offcuts I snapped up without a pang. But some small part of me balked at feet. Not that I had any right: I’m not religious. My husband isn’t Jewish. I believe in respectful carnivory, in humanely raised meat, in eating every bit of the animal. Including the feet.

Naturally the dish benefited. Pig feet are collagen bundles. French women, adept at conjuring delicacies from nearly nothing, have dropped pig feet into their stewpots for centuries. So were Judy Rodgers and David Tanis. Who am I to argue?

In writing this I realize myself on some sort of…quest is too strong a word. Journey, with its new-age connotations, isn’t right, either. Yet the distance from toss-everything-in-the-pot to a careful selection of slowly prepared ingredients, some necessitating mental acrobatics, well, it’s either hugely overthought (please, it’s stew!), or a declaration of intent.

Increasingly I find myself drawn to Paula Wolfert’s stews. Wolfert’s stew recipes are often insane acts of culinary valor, taking days to prepare. Such dishes aren’t a question of time: nobody has that kind of time anymore. Instead, consider her recipes worthy policy decisions, investments in your culinary education, for to follow a Wolfert recipe is to learn and eat wonderfully.

About that declaration of intent: stews requiring days to prepare reflect the wish for a life I once hoped for but do not have. The nice kitchen—forget anything approaching French farmhouse—has failed to appear. Fine pots are at a premium. Clay confit vessels and cassoulet pots have yet to materialize. The health one raises a glass to is best not discussed. Whenever I cook from Paula Wolfert’s books, which is often, the fact of her Alzheimer’s Disease weighs heavily on my heart. Nonetheless, the benefit of her eight great cookbooks is always with me. My gratitude is boundless.

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There are as many variations on the braise as there are cooks. Braised Short Ribs is one approach among many. You can vary the cut of meat, the wine, use bits of smoked pork or omit them entirely. The vegetable element may range from rutabaga to turnips to celeraic to parsnips. There are of course potatoes. A dozen pitted black olives may be added at the end of cooking. Add a spoonful of spicy mustard or leave well enough alone.While a shot of brandy or Armagnac is traditional, it isn’t obligatory.

Braising once happened in the fireplace. It now happens in the oven, but if yours is occupied, braised short ribs may be prepared stovetop, in a slow cooker, in an instant pot, or a pressure cooker.

Whatever you do, braised short ribs make ideal cold weather eating: easy to prepare, warming, a meal in a bowl. With luck, you’ll have leftovers.

A braise may not be a journey or even a declaration of intent. Yet the act of preparing one takes a stand against a world asking us to go ever faster. We are continually inundated, even assaulted, by stimuli. Some of us are forgetting how to turn off. While no one recipe can remedy this, braising, which cannot be rushed, can remind us that slowness has its rewards.