Go for the gold: It’s Stew Time (Unless It’s Not)

February 16, 2022

Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Roscoe Betsill. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

It's Stew Time (Unless It's Not)

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. We've got a whole world of hearty stews and braises waiting for you right now, balms against winter's bite. Take a look at Yewande Komolafe's new recipe for eintopf (above), the hearty German stew. She learned to make the dish from her parents, who picked it up when they were graduate students in Berlin, a simple one-pot preparation of braised short ribs with fennel, squash and sweet potato that could provide meals for a week.

Once you've finished those leftovers, you can move on to a perennial favorite: old-fashioned beef stew, one of the most popular recipes on New York Times Cooking and a standing testament to the excellence of Molly O'Neill, the longtime Times columnist who developed the recipe in 1994. You should make that stew sometime soon, particularly if you haven't already.

Consider as well this terrific pressure-cooker Guinness beef stew with horseradish cream from Sarah DiGregorio, with its velvety, roux-based braising sauce. Ponder this fresh and wild mushroom stew from David Tanis, or this exceptional brown stew chicken from Millie Peartree. And if it's even more old-fashioned than Molly's, Craig Claiborne's beef stew is no less flavorful. (Regina Shrambling's Dijon and Cognac beef stew may even be a little more so.)

Three sisters stew? Chickpea and winter vegetable stew? Pinakbet? You could be at it with a Dutch oven and fragrant, burbling excellence for the rest of the season.

Of course, plenty of us live in sunshine and warmth, even in February. Stew's not always appropriate. A Sicilian-style citrus salad might be a better call for some, a halibut niçoise, maybe Melissa Clark's latest: smoky roasted sweet potatoes with eggs and Marcona almonds.

Or you could make this sticky, flavor-packed curried roast chicken with grapefruit, honey and thyme, which puts me in a Los Angeles frame of mind, eating outside on a balcony, somewhere in West Hollywood.

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Now, it's nothing to do with celery root or the smell of a fresh mango (though peach pie does play a role), but I enjoyed "Reacher" on Amazon Prime. The drama is not quite as precise and analytical as the novels by Lee Child that inspired the series, but that's fine. It's still bingeable.

See what you think of this essay by TW Lim in The Prepared, about technology's inability to automate the mortar and pestle, and how the rise and use of the food processor illustrates "the complicated ways in which technology incarnates economic history, and the cultural burling that results."

A while back, I previewed "The Trojan Horse Affair," the new podcast from Serial and The Times about the origins of a mysterious letter that led to a national scandal in Britain. Now that I'm through to the end, I'm circling back to say: It's a must-listen.

Finally, here's some new music to play while you're stewing: Cate Le Bon, "Moderation." Enjoy that, and I'll be back on Friday.