Instant Pot Beef Stroganoff

The dish is named for the Stroganov family, one of the wealthiest merchant dynasties in Russian history — fur traders who had built an empire from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific. The recipe appears in the 1861 edition of A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena Molokhovets, the most influential Russian cookbook of the nineteenth century, though food historians believe it was already a fixture of aristocratic St. Petersburg tables for at least a generation before that. What Molokhovets recorded was a dish of remarkable elegance: thin strips of beef — the best cut available, sautéed at ferocious heat for no more than two minutes so they remained pink at the center — finished in a sauce of sour cream and mustard that the French influence at the Russian court had introduced into the aristocratic kitchen. The sauce was never cooked after the cream was added. The beef was never overcooked. These were the two commandments of the original. The Instant Pot version adapts the Stroganov method for tougher, more economical cuts by using pressure to achieve the tenderness that the original recipe achieved through expensive beef and precise technique. The sour cream still goes in at the end, off the heat — this commandment has not changed in one hundred and thirty years.