Blanquette de Veau

This simple beef stew was one of the most exciting dishes I learned to make in my earliest days at culinary school. Why? Because it was the simplest of stews but one that, through care, resulted in a finished dish of extraordinary elegance. It was a dish that one of the early skills classes prepared for the graduation-day banquet, to which the Culinary Institute of America’s president, Ferdinand Metz, always came. And I was alerted to the fact that President Metz, a man greatly respected by