Description
This is the stew that made such an impression on the final episode of the first season of Top Chef Masters. Each of us had been asked to create a meal that would be an autobiography told through the dishes we would present to the judges. I immediately thought of baeckeoffe ("baker's oven"). The name refers back to the time when bakers used wood-fired ovens. After the bread was done, this dish would be baked long and slow in the falling temperatures of the cooling oven. Since everyone in town would see the baker every day for the family's daily loaf, each would often bring a casserole to be baked in the oven. It was traditional, particularly on Mondays, when the women went to the river to do their laundry. They would have marinated their meats and vegetables overnight, dropped their casseroles off in the morning on their way, and then picked them upplus a loaf of breadon their way home. Even though my father was not the bread baker and had a modern, gasfired oven, people still took their casseroles to him. They liked to drop in because he always had some joke or story to tell. Before the village baker also invested in a modern oven and was still using wood, when my father turned over a fresh loaf of bread to give it the traditional blessing, he would sometimes see pieces of charcoal embedded in the crust. That would send my dad wild, muttering that "he [the baker] did not thoroughly clean his oven!"
