The winter dish that sounds daggy but never goes out of style

Now is not the time for a quickly tossed salad or an outdoor barbecue. Now is the time for stew, and thank heavens for that. Such a daggy term doesn’t seem fair for such a noble pursuit as slow-cooking big, tough muscles of meat in wine, stock, onions and carrots until tender and gelatinous. It’s not even meat any more, but stew, and it’s glorious.

Credit: Simon Letch

Stews take longer to cook, and require further consideration as to wine. You can’t eat them on the run; they demand sitting down in a civilised manner. They also demand a sympathetic carbohydrate, such as mashed potato or rice or pasta, which is half the fun.

Travelling through some of Europe’s most charming smaller cities recently, I did my usual in-depth research, tapping chefs and friends for recommendations, and trawling through the Michelin Guide, Gault&Millau, World’s 50 Best Restaurants, World of Mouth (a handy new insider-based restaurant guide app) and each city’s own locally produced guides. As a result, I dined extremely well on variations of robata-grilled white asparagus, North Sea shrimp, steak tartare, Brittany crab, sweetbreads, paté en croûte, morels and gariguette strawberries.

After a week of such truffle-snuffling, however, I’d had enough, and just Googled “stew”. First, I’d sleuth which stew the locals had developed over the past few hundred years – beef carbonnade in Brussels, for instance, cooked in the local beer. Then I would Google “best carbonnade in Brussels”, and book in for dinner. A search for “best waterzooi in Ghent” yielded a mighty platter of chicken stew studded with carrots, leeks and potatoes in a creamy sauce thickened with egg yolks. Inevitably, I dined in ancient restaurants founded in 1865 or 1892, seemingly staffed by the original waiters. There were no cocktails, no fancy flourishes and no pretensions, just a mutual understanding that you wanted stew, and they had stew.

Back home, I’m cooking my own stews, from boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin to osso buco and zuppa di pesce. ’Tis the season for Chinese and Korean hotpots, Moroccan tagines and, of course, rich Indian and Thai curries. Call them old-fashioned – because they are – but stews link us to the past, to the cooking of grandmothers, and to making the most of what we have. And that’s something that will never go out of fashion.

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