Irish Stew & New York Strip

By Joe Essid Jr., December 2018

My mom, Margaret Bolton Essid, had a gift for making beef stew.  She was a good cook, all things considered, but a few of her signature dishes, such as pan-fried oysters or chicken and potatoes cooked in an electric frying pan, were memorable. That said, her "Irish Stew" was in a league of its own.  I have had something close, in Ireland, when I had a dish of Coddle, a thick and nourishing beef or lamb stew. Coddle often has sausage, but mom stuck to cubed beef. She only added three vegetables: carrots, onions, and potatoes. The seasoning was also simple: salt, pepper, and one of the off-the-shelf seasoning packets for stew.  She'd brown the meat in an inexpensive vegetable oil, add the onions, then water and the other veg. 

The results of this simple dish were stunning: "it will stick to your ribs," she said. And it did. The gravy was very thick and not oily. The late Barbara Essid would beg mom to make it whenever Louis and his family visited, and though mom said it was a winter dish, she would cook it in high summer for Barbara.

I wish I'd gotten the recipe down right. I'm an experienced cook and do most of the cooking at our home, but mom's stew has eluded me. She showed me, but fool that I was, I didn't write anything down. Nowadays, I make some great stews, but not mom's. I'll keep trying.

This story is less about the stew, however, than it is about a time of transitions in my family's life. In the early 1970s, Dad stopped driving a truck full time to open, with his cousin Leroy Soffee, a produce wholesaler in Chesapeake, VA. Berkeley Tomato was a great success after a few years. Dad and Leroy got contracts for the Norfolk Navy Base, Langley AFB, and Burger King.  I am not a big fan of fast food, but I still eat an occasional Whopper. They put me through college.

Before that time of plenty, however, Dad and Leroy scrambled to get customers. Money came in slowly, but we still lived in the row house at 3340 Parkwood Ave., had one car (often gone off with dad), and times could be tough if dad were away for more than a week. Mom and I, as one did in urban neighborhoods then and now, walked up the street to the grocery store. This was before Cary Street entered the rough patch that lasted from the mid-70s until the early 90s. It was still a working-class shopping strip, and if they didn't have what we needed, we could not imagine where else to shop.

It's childish nostalgia speaking, but those years, just as white flight emptied out the neighborhood and stores began to close on Cary, seem today like paradise. My school days at Saint Benedict's were hellish, being a bookish kid lousy at sports, but coming home was great. I had my friend Gary Braswell and then, after we'd done refighting World War II with Avalon Hill board games or GI Joe, I had mom's great cooking for dinner.

I recall how once, after pestering mom in cold weather to make us stew, she began to prepare it. It was not as slow-cooked as my own chili or pasta sauce, that go for hours in a Dutch oven or slow cooker, but she managed, in half a day, to get her Irish stew just right. On that particular occasion, when dad came home from work, most likely downtown in Richmond arranging a shipment of tomatoes from Florida to Chesapeake, the stew was mouth watering. I probably ate two bowls; I'm sure Dad did.

"Margaret," said a man who rarely gave compliments, "That stew is the best you've ever made!"

"Thank you Joe."

"That beef is so tender! So what meat did you use?" 

Mom shrugged. "There was some in butcher paper in the meat drawer." I'd seen it go in there, into the 1950s round-top Frigidaire we had to defrost every few months. And I saw Big Joe lose the color in his face.

"The New York Strip?"

Mom looked puzzled. "Yes."

"WOMAN! NO DAMN WONDER IT WAS SO GOOD!" Dad could yell to lift the roof, but after that he seemed to collapse. He muttered something about how much New York Strip cost per pound. We were not as poor as we'd been a few years earlier, when mom would make a meal out of whatever she had on hand, while Dad and his truck had been gone for two weeks. At times, the refrigerator got pretty empty, and there's no nostalgic way to recall that.  Even I, a little kid, noticed. Cruel kids at the snooty Catholic school said I lived in a ghetto.

Once he had money, however, Dad was great about buying food, and he filled everyone's refrigerators on vacations. He recalled eating onion sandwiches and picking dandelion greens with his mother during The Great Depression. 

But our first New York Strips were another matter; eating steak regularly marked one's progress from franks-and-beans living to something almost genteel. If our menus was not quite Windsor Farms, it was at least Kensington Avenue.  Our Armenian neighbors had some money, and Harry Delolian was always grilling strip steaks beside the house, in the narrow breezeway (at least until the day the Fire Department showed up, drawn by the billows of smoke from his grill).  

So dad, having a little spending money after all those years of near poverty, smelled Harry's cookouts and bought himself some strips plus a little charcoal grill. Eventually, he did use it to cook us steaks.

That night, however, we finished every last drop of Irish stew. Dad's anger passed quickly, as it usually did. Mom was more careful about stew meat ever after, and we ended up with one more funny family story to tell. Dad often did retell it, with a lot of mirth, about the day Mom used one of our family's first New York Strips for Irish Stew.

Afterword:

If you want to try your best to re-create Mom's recipe, begin here. I adapted it as follows: I cut out the stout, and I did not peel carrots or potatoes. Naturally, I substituted a New York Strip for the meat noted. Mom did not heavily salt her stew or use tomato paste. 

I did try the recipe's tomato paste, and I used duck broth I already had frozen, the first time I tried the recipe. It was salty. Had I used beef broth, I'd have added salt to taste.  Cook your stew slowly until it is very thick. I added salt and pepper during the last hour, after adding the cornstarch mentioned in the recipe.

The result was really good, but the gravy is not mom's; it was thick enough but tasted of tomato. I'll try again without the tomato paste to keep the sauce brown, and put in a bit of stout for the caramel and chocolate it brings to my chili. 

In the end, slavishly recreating something exactly is less important to me than keeping a tradition going, altering it slightly over the years. I hope you will make some Irish stew and think of Margaret Bolton Essid when you do.