A Bengali girl in a French kitchen

For the first 23 years of my life at a stretch, my world of food revolved around rice, fish and vegetables cooked in traditional Bengali way. We occasionally ate out and street foods played a very important role during those years. Then came the period of thriving on instant noodles and coffee and eating cheeseburgers everyday for lunch! (The only time in my life when I managed to gain some weight.) Finally after getting married I started to try my hand at cooking various kinds of food.

Learning new things from scratch is a very satisfying feeling, be it a new programming language or a new cuisine. What I believe truly is if you want to learn, there's no end of resources to learn from :) I tried to cook some archaic Bengali food, well, may not be that "archaic" in the real world but definitely to me. That boosted my confidence a lot. As I never cooked anything while still in Calcutta, I never had any idea if I was a good or bad cook. After finding that I love to cook, I started trying my hand at western cooking following some of Martha Stewart's recipes. Watching "Julie and Julia" for probably the 15th time, it dawned on me that I can try to master the art of French cooking too! In the mean time, I went wine tasting with a couple friends and started learning about pairing wine and cheese with different foods.

As I had almost no idea whatsoever with French cuisine, I started learning it very patiently, reading the recipe at first, noting down the ingredients and watching one episode of Julia Child's "The French Cook" from YouTube before getting near the dutch oven :-) Arnab gifted me a copy of "Mastering the art of French Cooking" and a dutch oven for Thanksgiving and I started off with the first baby steps towards cooking bouef bourguignon.

Choosing to cook bouef bourguignon as the first French dish was probably not a "baby step", I could have tried a soup or something simpler, but this was because the movie inspired me to take on this challenge!

Fred Meyer's did a good job of selling pre-packaged "beef for stewing" which was boneless beef already chopped into bite sized chunks. The thick cut bacon was also quite good for my purpose. Cremini mushrooms are always available and I probably emptied the box myself. Buying the wine was a little difficult as I hardly knew how to pronounce the names (I wrote all the options down on my shopping list) and finally got a young Chianti that, according to Julia Child would fit my purpose.
The thing I learned from cooking this stew is, it is not a difficult dish but extremely time consuming. Bengali dishes are far more complicated compared to this, but I don't know of anything that has a two and half to three hours cooking time (not including the preparation). Also, the only seasoning needed for this was salt and pepper. The entire flavor came from the beef being stewed in red wine and beef broth. (Well, a little thyme and a bay leaf was added.) Another great thing was butter. The pearl onions were braised in butter and the mushrooms were sauteed in some more...then they got added to the meat. So there was a LOT of butter!

As the entire thing was stewed in wine, there was a distinctive taste that I have never had in anything so far. The dish is very heavy too and just a little would keep you filled for hours. If you have a dinner roll or even buttered peas with it, it will go a long way!

So that was an "encounter of the third kind" with French cooking and the result? Arnab said he can eat this bouef bourguignon every week.

Many thanks to Julia Child for meticulously jotting down step by step details of this foreign dish for "servantless" people like me, to whoever uploaded the episodes of "The French Chef" on YouTube and also to Nora Ephron for making the movie which opened up a whole new world in front of me (and to Arnab for his encouragement, being the first one to eat the experimental cooking and for being the "Paul Child", taking pictures on his new Windows 8 phone all along!)