A Fall Feast for the Saints

L egend has it that when the Archangel Michael ousted Satan from heaven, the devil plummeted to earth and ended up in a blackberry bush. Predictably, the devil cursed the bush, and since then blackberries are said to go sour after the 29th of September (the traditional Feast of the Archangels). Besides being amusing Catholic trivia, why might this information be important to know? Because a dinner party celebrating the occasion isn’t complete without a correctly themed cocktail.

The end of September through the beginning of October holds quite a number of special Catholic feast days, and while I would love to celebrate them all, time is a limiting factor. I settled for combining a mere two — the archangels from the aforementioned 29th, and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux on October 1. With a dinner date set for September 30 (and with apologies to Saint Jerome), I set about planning a menu that honored each saint or archangel.

Saint Thérèse’s portion was, in theory, the easy part. This late-19th-century French saint is beloved the world over, despite her being a cloistered Carmelite nun and dying at the age of 25. Her autobiography, Story of a Soul, is considered essential spiritual reading by many. And if anyone ever tries to convince you that this saint’s writings are shallow and saccharine, I would invite you to read Father Marc Foley’s The Love That Keeps Us Sane and Father Jean C. J. d’Elbee’s I Believe in Love alongside Thérèse’s own words. They will help you unlock the beauty and depth of this Catholic treasure.

The French have perhaps the most famous cuisine in the world, so I had plenty to choose from when creating this menu. For simplicity’s sake, I settled on boeuf bourguignon (beef burgundy), dinner rolls, and éclairs, with a few light appetizers. This was wise in many respects, but mainly because the beef burgundy took two days to make. Not because I messed anything up, though. No, this is a stew that requires numerous steps including marinading and oven-baking and a night in the fridge for best results, and I was determined to see the process through.

Shockingly, I did remember to read the whole recipe before starting to cook, but I’d managed to overlook one crucial detail: a single bottle of wine is 25 ounces. I was tripling the recipe and had bought only one bottle of pinot noir. Luckily for me, I had enough red wine stashed in my pantry that I was able to cobble together the rest of the marinade without leaving my apartment again. Since I had 50 pearl onions to peel, time was of the essence. Please don’t think I was actively trying to make my life harder. If I could’ve bought pre-peeled frozen ones, I’d have done so, but regular unpeeled ones were all Kroger had on offer at the time.

Anyway, my meat, onions, carrots, aromatics, and wine all went into the fridge Sunday night, patiently awaiting the Great Undertaking, which would commence Monday morning.

This recipe already requires a fair amount of batch cooking, and tripling it increased the labor in this area immensely. It took me two hours just to get the pot in the oven for its first hour-long bake, thanks to the nearly four pounds of beef, 21 ounces of mushrooms, 15 ounces of bacon, and nine cloves of garlic — all elements that required specific cooking treatment. Time-consuming as it was, this was the most fun I’d ever had making a stew, following a recipe precisely so I would get the right layers of flavor. After its first hour in the oven, I stirred in the sautéed mushrooms and onions and then let it bubble away for another hour and a half. After a stovetop cooldown, I popped the whole pot into the fridge, where it would sit overnight and allow the flavors to deepen.

At this point, my apartment smelled indescribably good, so I decided that, before I devoured stew meant for my guests on the morrow, I needed to leave and track down some liquor.

Michael P. Foley, a patristics professor at Baylor University, published the delightful Drinking with the Saints book in 2015, and while I don’t drink cocktails often, I sometimes flip through the text just for the fascinating history, stories, toasts, and humor woven throughout. It follows the Catholic liturgical year and gives wine, beer, and cocktail recommendations for use in celebrating different feasts. I’ve consulted it a fair amount over the years, and I knew I could count on it to come through for the Feast of the Archangels. Indeed, when I turned to the correct page, there was the blackberry bush story along with a recipe for “St. Michael’s Sword.” My hometown has plenty of liquor stores, but very few of them carried all three elements of this cocktail: Jim Beam Devil’s Cut Bourbon Whiskey, blackberry brandy, and orange bitters (plus a cherry pierced with a cocktail sword for garnish). After braving a slightly sketchy grocery store, however, I managed to secure all three and then zipped out of the parking lot to refresh my soul with a Trader Joe’s trip in pursuit of flowers.

Flowers and liquor in hand, I made it back home and continued to resist temptation to dig into the stew.

National Review’s managing editor, Jessica Hornik Evans, insists that no one makes éclairs from scratch at home, but I am living proof that it can be done. Would they pass muster in a French bakery? Absolutely not. But given that this was my first attempt, and that my homemade chocolate pastry cream was neither lumpy nor curdled, I claimed a major victory. While fussy, they were delicious, and I’d certainly make them again — with better results, since I now know to pipe larger shells. King Arthur Baking has been my boon companion for a number of recent baking exploits, and the recipe for these éclairs was no exception. Perhaps over Thanksgiving I’ll have another go — but this time, I’ll try vanilla custard for the filling.

My French bread skills are actually fairly advanced, at least when it comes to baguettes. A few years ago, I became rather good at making these finnicky loaves (part of a school fundraiser) and even managed to create their pointier counterpart, pain d’épi. Delicious as this would’ve been, I settled for the less time-intensive option of dinner rolls. While those cooled, and with the help of my roommate and some early guests, I tossed together two appetizers from Emily Chapman’s new cookbook, Around the Catholic Table, (which I plan to review here soon — it is inspiring), put the stew on to warm, and began filling the éclairs.

With the smell of stew filling every corner of my home, other guests started arriving, and I eagerly began offering cocktails to all. My mixed-drink equipment is rather rudimentary, but it added an amusing element to the party, shaking ice and liquor in a vinaigrette container.

Drinks in hand, stew bowls steaming before us, eclairs waiting in the wings, we toasted our Little Flower and the archangels, thanked them for their intercession, then tucked in. Bon appétit indeed.