The Original Beef Stroganoff of Imperial Russia

Today there are many variations on the classic Russian dish beef stroganoff, but I wanted to go back and see what the original would have tasted like so I am recreating this recipe from 1871. So thank you to Wild Grain for sponsoring this video as we make stroganoff of the beef variety, this time on Tasting History. To figure out what the original beef stroganoff would have tasted like we have to go back to 19th century Russia, specifically the 1871 edition of Podarak Molodym Khozaykom, or A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena Molokhovets. Originally published in 1861 it had over a thousand recipes in addition to instructions on how to manage your household, how to deal with your servants, and how to save money probably by getting rid of some of the servants. Eventually by the 1904 edition it would have over 4,100 recipes in it, but it is the 1871 edition that concerns me because that is where you first see the recipe for beef stroganoff with mustard. It says two hours prior to cooking take two funts of tender beef, cut in small cubes, and sprinkle with salt and allspice. Take 30 grams butter and one tablespoon of flour and mix. Lightly fry in a skillet, then mix with two glasses of stock, add one teaspoon of sarepskaya mustard, a little bit of pepper, mix well, bring to a boil, then strain and add two tablespoons of the best fresh sour cream. Then fry the beef in butter, then add it to the sauce, boil again, and serve. So as with many historic recipes this one has some measurements which need a little bit of explanation like a funt. What the heck is a funt? Well it is an old Russian form of measurement that equaled about 410 grams or a little bit less than a pound, and she also talks about glasses as in glasses of stock, teaspoons, and tablespoons, which today a teaspoon and a tablespoon, very specific in how much those are. Not so back in the day, especially in Russia. Really any anywhere during this period it just wasn't standardized. So I had to do some testing, some research, and a little bit of guesswork to figure out what this recipe actually wants me to do. What doesn't take any guesswork is baking the wonderful artisanal breads and pastries that I got from today's sponsor, Wild Grain. Wild Grain is the first bake-from-frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries, and fresh pastas, and they partner with small bakers and pasta makers around the country to bring their best creations to your kitchen. Like the difference between sourdough bread and fresh baked sourdough bread is night and day, truly. But fresh baked sourdough bread is usually a lot of work because sourdough starter is just it's like a full-time job. But Wild Grain lets you bake fresh sourdough in your home in less than 25 minutes. They also have amazing pastries like croissants, and some of the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever had. And since you can customize your boxes, you better believe that in my next box I'm getting more of those cookies. So to easily turn your kitchen into a bakery then give Wild Grain a try by going to wildgrain.com slash tasting history, or click the link in the description and use my code tastinghistory, and you will get $30 off of your first box plus free croissants for life. That is free croissants in every box when you order with wildgrain.com slash tasting history. But that is baking, and today we are not baking, we are cooking on the stovetop. So for this recipe what you'll need is 1.8 pounds or 820 grams of beef. Most any cut will work for this, but it does say that it wants a tender cut in the recipe, so something like a filet or a strip steak or something good, that's what you want to use. Then 2 teaspoons of salt, 1 teaspoon of allspice which is about 15 grains ground up, 8 tablespoons or 115 grams of butter, 2 tablespoons of flour, one and a half teaspoons of sarepska mustard. Sarepska is a thick, strong, spicy form of mustard that is popular in Russia, Poland, much of Eastern Europe, and you can get it online or at a specialty shop, but if you can't find any then Dijon will work in a pinch. Then one and a half cups or 350 milliliters of beef stock, 1 teaspoon of black pepper, and 2 heaping tablespoons of smetana which is a thick sour cream. So first chop the meat into bite-sized cubes about one inch. Today the beef is often made into strips but this recipe definitely says it wants cubes. Once they're cut up put them in a bowl and sprinkle in the salt and allspice, and then toss everything to coat the meat, and then set this in the fridge uncovered to rest for two hours. When the beef has rested melt 6 tablespoons of the butter in a deep skillet, and once it's sizzling add the beef in. You don't want to overcrowd the pan so if need be you can do this in a couple batches. Let the meat cook for a minute or two, and then flip each piece over and let it continue to cook for another two or three minutes or until the meat has a nice browning on it. Then remove the meat from the pan and set it aside while you make your sauce. Now if there's a lot of butter and grease still in the pan you can drain some away, but don't get rid of that fond on the bottom of the pan, that kind of stuff that's stuck, because that's going to add a lot of great flavor to the sauce. So set the pan back over a medium-low heat, and add in the remaining two tablespoons of butter and let it melt. Once it's melted add the flour in and mix it with the butter, and gently stir it while it smooths out and turns into a light roux. It'll be about three to four minutes of stirring constantly, and you'll get to a nice light brown color. Then you can slowly drizzle in the beef stock, stirring it into the roux, and as you pour it in it should release that fond that's stuck to the bottom of the pan. Let it cook for a minute, then add in the mustard and the pepper, and stir until everything is well incorporated, and then let it sit and come to a simmer. Simmer it for two or three minutes while it starts to thicken, and when it's as thick as you want add the sour cream or smetana, stir it in completely, and then finally add in the cooked beef into the pan, and coat it all in the sauce. Then let this come to a simmer, and simmer for another two minutes before serving. And when it comes to serving beef stroganoff today in the U.S. it's usually served with noodles, or rice, or sometimes mashed potatoes. In Russia it's very often served with potato straws, basically french fries, just a little thinner, and that tradition actually goes all the way back to a recipe from 1912. Calls for it to be served with potato straws, and that is the first recipe that has onions and tomato paste added in, which is common throughout the recipe going forward. But in our recipe from 1871 it is actually a much simpler dish, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't considered fancy because even though it was simple it was made for some of the most well-to-do families in in Russia, specifically the stroganoffs. Beef stroganoff has many origin stories, most of which are just that, stories, because even if they're plausible they don't have a lot of evidence to support them, and surely the dish did not just spring up fully formed in the mid-19th century. It had earlier predecessors to it. All the way back in 15th century Hungary they were making dishes of little pieces of beef simmered in mustard and sour cream, and I'm actually going to Hungary, Budapest specifically, next month so while I'm there in the depths of winter if you have any suggestions on what I should do I'm all ears. So perhaps the dish originated in Hungary. Nobody's really sure. Nobody's really even sure where the dish got its name, stroganoff. It is almost definitely from the stroganoff family, but that family has been around for hundreds of years and so nobody knows who really deserves the credit, or rather whose chef probably deserves the credit. Nobody really even knows where the family got its origin. Some historians say that the stroganoffs got their start as merchants in the city of Novgorod. Others say that they originated from the far north on the coast of the White Sea, and this would make sense because it was near there that the family in the early 16th century first found fortune producing salt, and it was there that in the hands of Anike Stroganoff, the family found favor with the Tsar Ivan IV better known as Ivan the Terrible, but despite his name and probably likelihood that he was terrible to a lot of people he was not terrible to these stroganoffs. He was very close to them, and gave them a lot of land, and gave them rights to different mines, and fisheries, and hunting, and he did very well for the family, and the family stayed in the good graces of pretty much all of the Tsars for the next 150 years. Then after helping to finance Peter the Great's military during the Great Northern War against the Swedish Empire, the three Stroganoff brothers at the time were given noble titles, first of Baron and then of Count. Now as part of the nobility under Tsar Peter, and especially under later Tsars or Tsarinas like Catherine the Great, it was expected that you and your household have a chef, and not a Russian chef but a French chef, and nobody in the family took this more to heart than the dashing General Pavel Aleksandrovich Stroganoff. He was advisor to Tsar Alexander I, and later would become known mostly for his patronage of the arts, as well as a possible inspiration for the dish that we are making today. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any contemporary evidence that suggests a link between Pavel and Beef Stroganoff, but it is probably true that he would have had a whole team of French chefs, who would have been making French dishes, but using Russian ingredients and methods, and that's kind of the story is that originally this was a French dish that came over to Russia, and that's when they included the mustard and smetana, but we know that that had actually been made for quite some time before, so here again it's just really a good story. That said it's a plausible story, very plausible because the dish definitely gained in popularity in the decades following Pavel's death, and it bears his family's name, so there's no reason to think that that couldn't have happened, and it was definitely a known dish by the time our recipe from 1871 was written down, because she didn't find any need to explain the dish's name, and so people seem to have already known it. Now another origin story puts it with the chef of not Pavel Stroganoff, but another Stroganoff Alexander Grigoryevich Stroganoff, and for this version of the story we do at least get more details like the name of the chef, the Frenchman Charles Briere, and we have a reason why he made the dish the way he made it. Supposedly it was because the count had bad teeth, and so Chef Briere would take the meat and stew it down until it was really, really tender, so essentially his employer could just kind of gum it. This story also has Chef Briere taking his recipe, and putting it into a culinary competition in St. Petersburg in 1891, and winning the grand prize, and that's what made the dish famous, except that we know that it was already at least somewhat well known 20 years before that, because it appears in the cookbook that we're cooking from today. Also I did some looking and couldn't find any documentation or evidence that suggested that a Chef Briere ever actually worked for the Stroganoff family. There might be, I just couldn't find it, so if it's out there and you know of it send it my way, otherwise I think it still stays in the realm of speculative story. What is not speculative is that by this time, by the late 19th and early 20th century, the dish had become very popular all through Russia, and it had begun to evolve. As I said in 1912 there is a recipe, it talks about it being served with the potato straws, as well as has the addition of onion and tomato, one or both of which is common in many versions today, and is actually probably the most common version that we see in Russia for at least the next 50 years, but as the dish left Russia it continued to evolve further and further away from its origins. It seems that in many cases the dish followed those who fled the country following the rise of the Bolsheviks. As one newspaper in 1926 said regarding the Restaurant Cosmopolis in London, A once wealthy Russian, a member of a distinguished family, has found it necessary like so many other victims of the Bolsheviks to build his life anew. He has opened a charmingly original cafe in Denman Street featuring dishes such as chicken soup à la rousse, pirozhki and Stroganoff beef, and it was in that same year that in New York City the Russian Tea Room opened, and it's often claimed that beef stroganoff was on their original menu. And again here I ran into a roadblock. I really wanted to find that original menu from the Russian Tea Room and see if it was actually on there, but I just couldn't find it. Again it'll probably pop up as soon as I've posted this video. I'll find it. Somebody will send it to me. It happens all the time, but whether it was on the menu or not it had definitely made its way to the United States either by then or very shortly afterward because a San Francisco newspaper mentions it in 1931. It says secret given for rousse dish of great fame. This says Nadia Lavrova is the classical Russian recipe for beef stroganoff which is always written in French on Russian menus. Then she goes on to give a recipe which is almost identical to the one that we're using today going all the way down to using similar wording and exact measurements in the same way that that ours has today, but hers does include the serving it with potato straws and the onion and tomato that we see in the 1912 recipe. Here too she makes one more possible addition saying that sometimes mushrooms are added to bouf stroganoff, and she uses the French bouf instead of beef because she does say that it is usually written in French on Russian menus. In fact stroganoff with the two F's is the French way of spelling it. Usually in Russian you would see it with a V or else in Cyrillic, and the French name of the dish was typically how it was spelled in American and English newspapers for much of the first half of the 20th century, sometimes even calling it beef à la stroganoff. Throughout the 1930s and 40s the dish continues to be printed in American and English cookbooks, Australian cookbooks, newspapers. It's all over the place but it is really changing, so much so that in 1947 the Indianapolis Star had to include three variations on the recipe just to cover their bases. What's more interesting is that by 1947 the relations between the U.S. and Russia had soured quite a bit, and so they have to preface the recipe saying the originator of this dish was a Russian, but don't let that stop you from serving it. And it didn't stop people from serving it because it really gained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. Cold war be damned. It became one of the standard dishes at both nice restaurants as well as on the kitchen table of most American families. More and more variations on the dish continued to arise, bringing in new spices and dropping many of the old, especially allspice. Some recipes I've seen don't include allspice, or mustard, or sour cream. Basically the only thing it has in common with the original is that there is beef involved, but I'm actually really enjoying the aromas of this original 1871 recipe, so I'm looking forward to trying it. And here we are, the original beef stroganoff of Imperial Russia. It smells really good. The allspice is definitely what kind of hits you in the nose, but in a pleasant way. It smells really nice. Let's try it. Mmm. Mmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's actually really good. The sauce kind of firms up very quickly. It's only been a few minutes and it's already firmed up. Maybe even use a little bit more sauce, which you can add more broth to it, but the flavor, that's good. The steak is also really nice and tender. Like I said you want to use something high quality, some high quality meat for this. Because it doesn't have that much time to cook. I mean you could cook it longer I guess, but you want good steak for it. But the sauce is just really, really nice. The mustard comes through, but it's not mustardy at all. Like you don't get any of the bite from the mustard. It's just the nice flavor. The allspice is definitely present. Some people I think might want a little bit less. I like allspice, but it is a flavor that we don't often associate with meat. But yeah this is definitely one that I suggest that you make. You should do it in the Russian style and get some french fries, potato strings, and put this on there. Really, really good. Not that hard to make. The longest part is just letting the meat sit with the salt and the allspice on it. So make this and I will see you next time on Tasting History.