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Anne Willan Cooks with Beer

 A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to chat with cookbook author, and Anne Willan. I was particularly interested in her new book "Country Cooking of France,"  particularly, what experience she has had in dealing with beer used in French recipes.

My first question had to do with the importance of beer and French provincial cooking. I asked just how important beer was in cooking in rural France.

“It is very much a country practice.  And it's very much, which is not a surprise, a regional practice.  Because where people drink beer they put it in the cooking.  Where they make wine they put the wine in the cooking, and where they make cider they put cider in the cooking.  So, when one thinks of recipes that are typically using beer, you're thinking of northeastern France and Alsace you will find recipes for coq au bier, made very much the same way as coq au vin. You can make it with darker beers but also with lager… “I was just looking through the recipes that are in "Country Cooking of France," there are over 200 of them, and there are a fair number where you can substitute beer for wine, and indeed cooks in beer brewing areas would do precisely that.”

“One of the great country dishes of France is something called Carbonade. You know about Carbonade? It is from Picardi, in northern France. You use lots of onions, cooking them to color them really well so that you get that nice caramelized flavor. After you take out the onions you brown the beef, searing the outside, and then you add not too dark a beer and a little bit of beef stock and you just kind of simmer the whole lot together.  That's a wonderful very traditional kind of dish.  “Carbonade” meaning it was just let to sit and simmer over the coals.”

“I'll tell you what would be excellent and delicious. There is a traditional dish from northern Provence from the Lyon, which is kind of Swiss steak. You layer onions, and you put steak on top and you pour over it some water or red wine. Then you add anchovies, and sometimes olives.  Now if you put beer instead of wine and water and you just put on the lid and you bake it very, very slowly in the oven.  It's called a Mariniere is because it was supposedly made by the sailors on barges as they would barge loads up from the Mediterranean up to Leone.”

The bitterness in the beer isn't a problem in that situation?

“A little bit of bitterness adds another dimension to the cooking.  It's very useful.  I mean one of the things that I noticed we've only just come back from France, is how much sugar is added to things.  Sugar is added to all sorts of inappropriate places.  So it's very nice to have just a little bit of touch of sharpness that the beer brings to the dish.”

So you don't run away all from that sharp flavor?

“On the contrary, you need of course, other types of well-rounded flavors to balance.  You don't want just a bitter overlay.  You want to know the whole thing together.”

What is the challenge to using beer in these dishes?

“Let's just look at the general characteristic of beer, which is generally the enzymes and possibly the touch of bitterness.  Taking it to the positive, it's always going to add more character and the more intrusive than huge varieties of wines that are used commonly in French cooking.  The darker beers have a touch of caramel and sugar that is going to be even more intrusive in be a very powerful background, like onions, root vegetables and things like Bruxelles Sprouts and turnips.  I would be interested in trying that.”

You mentioned enzymes, a couple of times I'm not quite too sure what you mean by that?

“Enzymes that give food the wide range of flavors from the process of fermentation, including yeast, but also including other ferment, including malolactic fermentation.”

So you're intensifying the flavors by reducing it down?

“You not only intensifying the flavors, but you're changing the flavors.  The flavors change quite a lot.  You boil off almost all the alcohol by the time it comes to a boil, and so that already is gone.  So that when the alcohol is gone and you keep on cooking it things start marrying and mellowing again. So you cook all the way through to get a very deep sauce.”

What intrigues you about beer and cooking?

“The great variety of beers there are and the layers of flavor that you find in some of them. The hop and enzyme kind of fight being flavor tingling flavor that are very different from wine.”

I thank you very much for this interview.

Anne Willan has just published Country Cooking of France: