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The Lighthouse

Daube de Boeuf

Virginia Woolf may have been a gourmet but she was no

cook. The famous passage in To the Lighthouse describing

the daube of beef is, quite simply, full of howlers.

‘Everything depended upon things being served up to

the precise moment they were ready. The beef, the bay

leaf, and the wine – all must be done to a turn. To keep it

waiting was out of the question,’ she asserted. How a bay

leaf can be ‘done to a turn’ is a conundrum at best: it is

there to give its aroma and to be eventually discarded. The

beef, and the wine for that matter, are cooked for a very

long time and the notion that any precision is required is

somewhat erroneous. One of the many good things about

a daube of beef is that it will wait around for a long time

without coming to any harm whatsoever.

Of course, Mrs Woolf did not pretend to be a cook, any

more than did Mrs Ramsay in the novel. In those days, the

cook did the cooking and the hostess took the credit. ‘It is

a French recipe of my grandmother’s,’ she declares, as

though possession of the recipe were grounds enough for

the garnering of praise. The actual cook was Marte, Mrs

Ramsay’s maid, and it is probable that the mysteries of

the daube were very much her family heirloom rather

than that of her mistress. The curious thing is that these

mysteries have largely been forgotten today. What we call

a daube is rarely anything of the sort.

When investigating the daube, I resolved to make it

exactly as most old recipes prescribe but as cooks never

now do. Although To the Lighthouse is vague on the

subject, the suggestion that Marte spent three days

making the dish suggests a modern style of daube.

Briefly put, this means that the meat was marinated with

vegetables and red wine, then subsequently removed from

its marinade, dried and browned before being reunited and

slowly braised and then, in all probability, separated again

from this entourage and embellished with fresh

ingredients – lardons, onions, mushrooms, olives and the

like – before being served. C’est magnifique mais ce n’est

pas la daube. This elaborate production is much more akin

to a boeuf bourguignon than a daube. The real thing is

simple and yet far superior and even Mrs Ramsay might

have been up to the work had she been able to locate her

pinafore. Whether Mrs Woolf could have managed is

perhaps more open to question.

67

February