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The cut: filet mignon
The dish: beef stroganoff
There is waste, and there is using filet mignon to make beef stroganoff. But this is what I intend to do, so apologies to Johnson Goulding of SE24 who emailed last week to accuse me of being a ‘pleb’ who ‘doesn’t deserve to be given a cow to butcher’. Filet mignon – it means ‘dainty fillet’ – is a steak from the tenderloin section of the sirloin. (Confusingly, in France it’s actually called chateaubriand, not filet mignon. No, I don’t know why.) It’s an expensive cut, especially if you buy it from a decent butcher like Ginger Pig, but its tenderness makes it perfect for a dish like beef stroganoff, which you don’t cook for long. Feature continues

People are snobby about Beef Stroganoff, partly because of its international popularity, but mostly because of its status as a ‘fake’ dish that pretends to be Russian but isn’t. In their compendium of kitsch ’60s and ’70s food ‘The Prawn Cocktail Years’, Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham joke that its name ‘might as well have been picked out of a Cossack’s furry hat’. But its provenance is more interesting than that suggests. Some food historians believe that it’s named after Count Pavel Stroganoff, a dignitary at the court of Alexander III, and was invented by his chef in the 1890s. Yet a recipe called ‘Beef Stroganov with mustard’ turns up in the 1871 edition of Elena Molokhovets’ ‘A Book for Young Housewives’. (Molokhovets was a sort of Russian Mrs Beeton – hugely popular until the Soviet era when she was denounced as ‘bourgeois and decadent’. A bit harsh, but she didn’t help herself: ‘Fresh roach is not very tasty and barely useful,’ she wrote. ‘It is, therefore, best used to feed the servants.’) Her version uses cubes of beef rather than strips, and while it contains soured cream it’s a mushroom-free zone, mushrooms being an ‘inauthentic’ American addition from the 1950s.

It’s important to cut the meat across the grain, otherwise it will be tough and stringy. Hopkinson and Bareham’s version includes onion, but I’d omit it if I were you, as it’s a bit overpowering. The dill, however, is a stroke of genius. If you’re a pleb like me you’ll want to eat it with long grain rice – none of your wild rubbish. But posher readers may wish to opt for buttery noodles. John O’Connell

Beef stroganoff
Brown 600g of sliced fillet steak in a heavy-bottomed frying pan, making sure it’s still rare in the middle. Set it aside. Add 25g of butter to the pan and fry three medium sliced onions until golden and sticky. Set them aside. Add another 25g of butter and fry 350g of sliced button mushrooms with 1 tsp of paprika until soft. Set aside. Pour 400ml of soured cream into the pan and warm through. Put the beef, onions and mushrooms back into the pan, bring to a simmer and stew gently for 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in the juice of one lemon and 1 dsp of finely chopped dill.

We bought our longhorn, Del Boy, at Ginger Pig. For further information about Borut’s butchery classes, see www.thegingerpig.co.uk.