Svíčková na Smetaně (Czech Beef in Cream Sauce)
Beef in a silky root-vegetable cream sauce with dumplings.
Svíčková na smetaně is Czech Sunday food: beef braised over a bed of carrot, celeriac and parsley root, which is then puréed with cream into the sauce. The body of that sauce comes from the vegetables rather than from flour. It is served with bread dumplings to take up every bit of it.
Ingredients
- 800g beef sirloin or topside
- 2 carrots, 1 parsnip, 1 celeriac wedge
- 1 onion
- 200ml cream
- Bay, allspice, thyme
- Vinegar, sugar, salt
Method
- 1
Brown the beef, then roast on a bed of the chopped root vegetables at 160C for 90 minutes with a little stock.
- 2
Remove the meat; blend the vegetables with the pan juices.
- 3
Add cream and simmer to a coating sauce.
- 4
Balance with vinegar and a little sugar until sharp-sweet.
- 5
Slice the beef and serve with bread dumplings and cranberry.
A cheap braising joint plus root vegetables feeds six on Sunday.
The Central European table around it
- Gulyás (Hungarian Goulash) — The Hungarian answer to the same Sunday main.
- Apfelstrudel — The dessert that follows it.
The Milk Bar Handbook
Six Central European recipes are free here; the guide holds fourteen, set in the five-country context the recipe pages leave out — menus, venues, bills, receipts, currencies and protected names.
Fourteen Central European recipes, and the menus, bills and labels of five countries.
- Fourteen Central European recipes with metric and US measures
- Five-country coverage: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria
- Menu and venue language, from bar mleczny and hospoda to kifőzde and Beisl
- Bills, receipts and the five currencies in play
Travelling more widely? The Complete European Table holds all seven expanded guides — 495 pages across 7 guides, one-time purchase.
Get all 7 guides — $29.99