The sticky beef ribs with the crunchy potatoes.

A recipe

I wanted to share a dish.

It’s the sort of dish that will take you most of the morning to organise.

It will drive you mad as the day progresses, as you won’t be able to escape the smell of slowly cooking beef shortribs, sticky and rich as they absorb the subtle flavours of aniseed and orange peel.

Before starting with the beef, you’ll caramelise a pile of diced pancetta. That will be enough to focus the mind on the task ahead. Sizzling, spitting pancetta, the smell of black pepper and salted pork, the smell that begins all serious classical French saucemaking. A smell that transports me instantly to any number of professional kitchens from the past.

One day I’ll share some sauce recipes. Ones that you would never find written anywhere. One day I’ll do that.

The sticky beef ribs with the crunchy potatoes

A fine way to spend a day

I can take half an hour slowly rendering cubes of bacon and fat in a heavy old pan. I use a Staub for cooking the meat as the base is so thick it takes about five minutes to heat to the point when I feel that I should begin. These pots live on a shelf above my head. A neat procession of assorted shapes and sizes of cast iron. Some enamelled in blues, greys and white, some the colour of the foundry. All very heavy and with an outstretched hand I pull one back in an odd movement as I lift five kilos of cold heavy iron over my head, my fingers pushed onto the lid letting gravity take over to prevent me from getting a thud on the head. I do wonder whether the lid would hurt more than the pot.

Anyway.

You see a dish like this is not meant to be rushed. This is a dish that you must dedicate a lazy day to. It is the sort of dish that demands you to be present throughout the day to help it along with a stir or a season. Checking that the ribs are getting stickier as the hours pass by. Tick tock.

The sort of dish that even after four or so hours of slowly braising the deeply coloured sticky meat, you need to let it rest for a while to soak up some of the sauce, becoming thick with the robust sauce that your ingredients have given you, before embarking on the next stage.

Gently lifting the treacly bones from their sauce, the meat gently falling away when nudged with the edge of a spoon, the result of hours of slow cooking at a low temperature. The sort of cookery that can never be rushed.