The well-loved cookbook challenge #4

Comforting casseroles and stews

Taking a bit of a break from the wall-to-wall Mexico coverage here’s the lowdown on this month’s well-loved cookbook challenge.

I like to keep these posts free so that everyone can pitch in but if you’d like to receive my exclusive wine, food and travel tips you can sign up for as little as £5 a month. Although I’m away this week there will be a whole flood of wine recommendations in the run-up to Christmas.

For the benefit of new subscribers who are unfamiliar with the idea it’s about revisiting the bespattered books on our shelves, the ones we go back to time after time.

It stems from one of my most popular posts where everyone piled in to share the books they loved the most and prompted the idea of cooking a favourite recipe each month from a book that’s 10 years old or older.

This coming month by popular demand it’s casseroles and stews, a style of cooking that seems to have all but disappeared which is crazy given how easy it is and what a boon it is to be able to prepare well ahead.

When I first learnt to cook these were some of the first things I made. It never occurred to me to be daunted by them.

They were generally based on beef or pork though I made chicken casseroles and the occasional sausage casserole too. (About which we had a bit of a family joke, my Francophile husband, who made a mean rabbit stew, regarding them, somewhat disparagingly, as typical English cooking.)

The French, admittedly, are particularly good at stews and braises - usually including wine like this Languedoc beef stew or beef bourguignon. But stews also work well with beer (think carbonnade) and cider which is excellent for pork or chicken.

You might like to try this West Country chicken casserole from my book Meat and Two Veg. (Yes, my publisher and I did snigger about the title!)

There used to be whole cookbooks devoted to them like Catherine Kirkpatrick’s 500 casseroles which you can pick up for under £3 now but open any cookbook from the 70s or 80s and you’ll find loads of inspiration. Goulash, I remember, was a particular favourite.

Maybe there’s another reason for their decline in popularity which is that the cheap cuts and ingredients, like shin of beef and neck of lamb, that made them so economical aren’t quite so cheap any more. But as I say they have other virtues and are deeply comforting at this time of year.

There are some cracking and more contemporary recipes in David Eyre’s marvellous book Big Flavours & Rough Edges - a collection of recipes from the Eagle which I was lucky enough to inherit from the late, great food writer Charles Campion’s cookbook library thanks to the generosity of my friend Pete Hannan who invited me to take a couple of books when I visited him back in the summer.

Flicking through the pages for this post there were so many tempting recipes like his fabada (Asturian pork and butter bean stew), belly pork stew with peas and saffron, casseroled beef with cinnamon thyme and shallots and pheasant casserole with chestnuts, ceps and bacon. 

And of course there are fish stews - I’d probably look to Rick Stein for those - but basically I’m thinking meat this month. 

Which books do you look to for casserole recipes and who's your casserole queen - or king? What did your mum or grandma (or dad or grandpa) use to make? Do you have a favourite recipe you always go back to?

If you enjoyed this post it would be kind if you’d give it a ❤️. (It helps to get it more widely read!)

Top photo © Natalia Hanin at shutterstock.com