Beef Stroganoff | Origins, Description, & Serving Styles (2024)

beef Stroganoff, dish of French origin by way of tsarist Russia that combines thinly sliced and lightly stewed beef and onions with sour cream and other ingredients.

Beef Stroganoff is, in essence, the classic French fricassée de boeuf with the addition of equally classic Russian ingredients: onions and sour cream. There is disagreement over which member of the noble Stroganov family was honoured with the name of the dish. One theory holds that the general and diplomat Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov, or Stroganoff, while visiting France, was feted with a variation on the dish, which was made with a sauce of Dijon mustard instead of sour cream. A second theory ventures that Charles Brière, a French chef living in Russia, simply attached the name of the noble family, which owned much of Siberia while maintaining a palace in St. Petersburg, to the dish that in 1891 earned him the grand prize at a culinary competition in what was then the Russian capital. It is possible that Brière had worked for the Stroganov family earlier, but, to complicate matters, a cookbook published in St. Petersburg in the 19th century contains a recipe called govjadina po-strogonovski s gorchitseju, or beef Stroganoff with mustard, which lends support to the first theory while diminishing the claim that Brière was its originator.

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With the addition of mushrooms as advocated by another cookbook author, Pelagia Alexandrova-Ignatieva, beef Stroganoff soon became a fixture on the menus of pre-Revolutionary Russian restaurants. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the dish traveled with Russian exiles to Shanghai, China, where a large expatriate community formed. At the same time, exiles introduced it to Paris and other European capitals. Later, beef Stroganoff was prominent among the offerings at the Russian Tea Room in New York. Inexpensive and not labour-intensive, beef Stroganoff became a popular dish for home cooks as well, and even at the height of the Cold War it was featured in standard cookbooks published in the United States.

After a long absence under that name, beef Stroganoff is now widely enjoyed in Russia, featured in several high-end restaurants in the Stroganovs’ Siberian headquarters in Perm and, famously, at the Café Pushkin in Moscow. Russians typically eat beef Stroganoff with potato straws, while many American cookbooks suggest that it be served over egg noodles or rice.