[Sca-cooks] Beef noodles and sour cream

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Jaime wrote:

>  I am new to the list, so Hello to everyone.  I was under the
>impression that beef stroganoff is a medieval dish.  I did a quick
>browsing of some of the online books but of course cannot find it
>under stroganoff.  I have seen it served at feasts before.  Under
>what name should I look?

Hello, Jaime, and welcome!

While there may be related dishes that are very old, Beef Stroganoff,
using that name and distinctive chafing-dish cookery method, is
probably something either introduced or inspired by the presence of
Russian exiles in France, somewhere between, say, the 1870's and the
Russian Revolution. If I may ask, where did you get the impression it
was a period dish? (I'm not absolutely certain there's nothing like
it in period, but there's certainly nothing like it in the one
semi-period Russian cookbook I've seen.

The Larousse Gastronomique claims that the dish is probably named for
a wealthy mercantile family named Stroganov, or that the name derives
from the Russian verb, "strogat", meaning "to cut into pieces." It
says the dish, or related antecedents, may go back to the 18th
century.

Adamantius