How to eat: beef stew

Do you add potatoes, parsnips, pearl barley or parsley? Wine or beer? Do you need bread and dumplings? Mash on the side? And since when did bowls become outmoded?

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A bowl of beef stew with properly sliced bread Photograph: Paul Avis/Getty Images

In February, that bleak nadir of the British winter, the body demands edible insulation. We need food for the furnace which, simultaneously, elevates the soul. Which is why, this month, How to Eat (the Word of Mouth blog trying to establish the best way to enjoy our favourite dishes), is serving up a big bowl of – what else? – beef stew (or casserole, if you're cooking it in the oven). It is time to take stock, my little dumplings. So, what's your beef?

Consistency

A stew is not soup. It should be a thick jumble of chunky XL ingredients, a mouthful, something you rummage through. Not drink. Or slurp off a spoon. There should be no need to play hunt the beef in a thin, watery liquor.

Good things to put in beef stew

Gelatinous, sinewy cuts (shin, cheek, oxtail etc), that, in addition to braising steak, are going to bring a lip-smacking, unctuous, pearlescent gloss to the gravy. Tiny onions; carrots; relatively hardy, fresh-out-of-the-ground celery, for flavour but also because you could cook celery for 10 hours and, remarkably, it would still retain its texture; a little pearl barley; red wine/ Worcestershire sauce/soy/stout (anything that will add savoury depth and complexity to that simmering liquid). See also, bay, thyme, even garlic. Purists may argue that such additions are a betrayal of the traditional John Bull British stew, a capitulation with the French beef bourguignon, but so what? You can't get all Nigel Farage about food. The only people hung up on such distinctions are grim, thin-lipped Daily Mail readers projecting decades of supressed anger accumulated over endless bowls of joyless, frigid, ration-card stew. Mushrooms invariably add little in flavour, but their silky texture is welcome.

Bad things to put in a beef stew

Bacon, limp, flobby bacon; potatoes, the core reactors of the vegetable world, big chunks of which seem to retain a thermonuclear temperature whilst everything else cools (see also, tomatoes) and which, even in otherwise tasty stews, will always just be a bum note of, well, boring boiled potato*. Parsnips, which, no matter when you add them (and isn't life too short to be adding the vegetables to a stew in stages?), end up inedibly raw or ungodly mush (see also, butternut squash); beetroot, a noncommittal nod to borscht; jerusalem artichoke (a swanky veg, wasted here); chorizo (which, like paprika, adds a slightly discordant note of smoke and heat); turnip. Ask yourself, have you ever eaten anything and said: "That was great, but what it really needed was ... more turnip!"

I am also deeply ambivalent about a little orange peel in your bouquet garni or grated lemon zest on top. I get the idea (that it adds a clean, light zing at the stew's edges), but if you're cooking a beef stew on the Anglo-French axis, I don't think that tokenistic nod to the Levante, no matter how subtle, fits the stew's flavour profile. I'm all for fusion, but those citrus notes sow confusion. If you want such flavours in your stew, go the whole hog, and cook a more aromatic and headily spiced tagine.

* Before I am deluged with comments, along the lines of: "Oh, it's all right for you Guardian writers, with your Islington townhouses and hotlines to Ocado, have you seen how much beef costs out here, in the real world? Eh? Eh? We need those potatoes for cheap bulk, you smug bourgeoisie scumbag. "I am not saying swap potatoes for beef. Carrot, onion, more barley, whatever … anything beats potato.

Herbs

"Mmm ...," says a chef, who lacks the courage of his own tastebuds, "that looks like a bowl of unappetising brown mulch. What it needs is some parsley scattered on top, or two pieces of chive artfully crisscrossed on the bowl, to give it some colour." But it doesn't, folks. It really, really doesn't.

Dumplings

Yes, yes and thrice yes. And get that lid off at the end, so they form a nice golden crust. Crustless dumplings are like Morrissey without Marr, the Godfather III. Nice enough, in their own way, but very much second best. Wasabi? Horseradish? Not on my watch. Mix in a few herbs, season it well and a good suet dumpling speaks for itself; it doesn't need wild amplification.

Bread

Bread and dumplings? How many carbs can one man need? To which the only answer as a northern male is: how many have you got? The bread, however, should never be fat wedges cut from a larger round loaf. That "rustic" affectation, usually encountered in pubs attempting to evoke a sense of farmhouse honesty (or is it grinding rural poverty?) in their cooking, is massively flawed for the one obvious reason: it minimises the surface area of the bread that you can butter. Insanity. Slices, you say? That is the answer but it needs to be robust real bread. In the right circumstances (eg bacon or tuna butty), I am the biggest advocate of white, sliced Chorleywood, but try dunking that in stew. It collapses, folds, swoons, turns to soggy cotton wool.

With good bread, a stew becomes a two-course meal. You butter and dip as an appetiser, and, when you've taken the edge off your initial hunger, tuck in. There is no need to jazz your stew up further with outsize herb croutons or even, as I once encountered, a huge, floating island of cobbler, drenched in grilled cheese. That is a layer of fat that this dish doesn't need. It is not French onion soup.

Serving

There are two groups of people that cookware manufacturers can sell any old tat to: chefs and middle-class foodies. That is why, ludicrously, batch-cooked stew is now regularly decanted into individual, warmed "oven-to-table" casserole dishes, which means not only does your stew fail to cool naturally, but you risk third-degree burns plucking the lid off, and are left with the dilemma of where to stick it, on an already crammed table. How is that an improvement on (sit down, this may shock you) a bowl? It is a receptacle with a proven history in stew delivery since Adam was a lad. Something nice and deep with a wide rim, for bread balancing, is perfect.

You may, of course, choose to serve your stew on a plate (get you!), with (celeriac) mash or even extra vegetables. All of which, to me, smacks of unnecessary overelaboration, and more washing up – the point of a stew is that it's a self-contained one-pot meal – but who am I to judge? Don't answer that.

When

After dark. It is a well-known fact that stew evaporates on contact with sunlight. Preferably on a Wednesday night, when the world has it in for you, and the rain is battering against the windows. NB Given that stew takes a few hours to cook and tastes better the day after you have made it, it pays to always have some in the freezer. Like plasters, alcohol, Savlon and cigarettes, it is one of those emergency supplies that every household needs ready access to.

Drink

Weirdly, with plainer stews and plenty of bread, a big tannic brew works. With more complex creations: red wine; crisp bitters; darker beers. Never water (or the stew dies in your mouth) or, indeed, any soft drink. This is about comfort, an attempt to blot out the world, remember?

So, beef stew, how do you eat yours?