Steak - Mark Schatzker [106]
Before I headed to the airport the following day, Vicky and Steve took me to see a store not far from their house called La Vaca Tuerta—The One-Eyed Cow. It is where locals go when they need a new parilla. The showroom is a wonderland of grills, grilling options, and grilling accessories. There were portable grills. There were hexagonal grills. There were grills the size of picnic tables. I found myself staring longingly at a three-foot-long number with grooved grill slats that carry away any melted fat so that it doesn’t land on the coals and cause a grease fire. Steve informed me that a debate rages in Argentina over grill slats. Some believe the grooved ones are superior, but purists cling to the round-slat grill. I told Steve that if I lived in Argentina, my parilla would be half-and-half. He said, “What accessories would you pick?” and I wandered the aisles like an eight-year-old girl in a dollhouse emporium, pointing at a wood-handled barbecue brush, a basket for creating perfect grilling coals, and a crank system for raising and lowering the grill. I had just designed my dream parilla. Steve, who had been hovering near the cash register, handed over his credit card to the cashier and said to me, “We’ll send it to you by FedEx.” My dream parilla was now my actual parilla. Weeks later, a white FedEx truck pulled up in front of my office and unloaded a box containing both round and grooved grill segments. My plan was to assemble it at my family cottage on Little Hawk Lake, three hours north of Toronto, where I live.
A family, it would seem, can be separated by war, genocide, half a century, and an entire hemisphere, but genealogical traits—a love of coffee and prunes in the morning, grilled steak in the evening—somehow survive. When contact is resumed, kinship flickers back to life. Two people who were strangers five days earlier, whose children shared trace levels of DNA with my children, gave me a parilla. They had taken a beautiful feature of their own lives and made it one in mine. Every time I placed steak on its enamel-coated grill, I would think of them.
But was it really all that surprising? Vicky and Steve, you see, plan on taking a trip to my side of the equator. Being Argentine, they will enjoy eating steak cooked over glowing wood coals roughly three times a week. And when family is visiting from Argentina, cooking steak over gas is an abomination.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FLEURANCE
I wasn’t sure I could handle one cow, let alone three, but when someone offers you three rare and potentially succulent cows for the price of two, even if you don’t own so much as a barn, let alone a proper farm, it’s hard to say no. That explains how, one crisp spring morning, a pickup truck towing a livestock trailer pulled in to a farm eighty-five miles north of my house, opened its gate, and released three bovine animals. One was brown, one was dun, and the last was a dark brown calf. I had six months, give or take, to make one of them delicious. The ground was still frozen, with remnants of fall grass flopped over and pasted to the cement-hard earth. This grass, I thought, had better start growing.
When I was little and grown-ups used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was “house builder.” Later occupational fantasies included ambassador, environmental lawyer, philosophy professor, lead guitarist of a popular and critically acclaimed rock band, and the greatest knuckleballer in the history of Major League Baseball. Farmer never made the list. I entered the cattle business for a single reason: meat hunger.
In hindsight, it would have been simpler to pack up and relocate to Bridge of Earn or Buenos Aires. But rather than move my young family partway around the earth just for the sake of good steak, I deluded myself into thinking there was primo beef closer to home. All I had to do was find it, and this proved easier said than done. For months, I was buying every kind of steak possible, hoping to strike a vein of beefy fantasticness. The results were all terrible,