Steak - Mark Schatzker [110]
Let me tell you about my backyard, for which the term “yard” is generous to the point of fantasy. It is a capacious thirteen by twenty feet—which amounts to half of 1 percent of one acre. What little topsoil there is, however, is in no danger of eroding, not even in a tornado, thanks to a former owner with connections in the construction business who poured a six-inch layer of concrete over the top of it. Grazing options are limited to a wisteria bush on the east fence, a grapevine on the west fence, and some herbs growing in a planter. A ruminant no bigger than a goat could graze for an hour, tops. If I was going to raise a cow on grass and apples, I needed a farm.
Luckily, I do know a farmer. Besides raising lambs, chickens, and ducks—not to mention potatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and so forth—Michael Stadtländer is considered by many people to be the best chef in all of Canada. A native German, he emigrated in the early 1980s and quickly established himself as a trendy downtown chef of considerable repute. But he gave all that up in 1993 so he could be closer to his ingredients. Ever since he was a teenager, he had had romantic ideas about the pure Canadian wilderness. He bought a large parcel of it, named it Eigensinn Farm, and started treating it like terroir, extracting pure savors from earth where none had grown before.
Stadtländer is afflicted with the same obsession as Borgo San Felice: locality. He likes to catch brown trout in his trout pond and bake them in clay harvested from the bottom of the same trout pond. He will buy a Georgian Bay lake trout from a local native fisherman and wrap it in wild grape leaves that grow on a fence next to his barn and grill the whole package over burning wood from trees grown, cut down, and chopped on the farm. Decades ago, some forward-thinking soul planted apple trees on his land, and in the fall Stadtländer picks the apples and makes cider, which he reduces on the stove into a glaze that he pours over his pork chops, which come from heritage-breed pigs who live within snorting distance of the apple trees.
Stadtländer had excellent news: he also wanted a cow. But there was a problem, in that we couldn’t actually graze a cow at his farm. He had tried it once before and discovered he didn’t have the right kind of fencing. (He obviously didn’t subscribe to the Stockman Grass Farmer.) He did, however, know another farmer who also wanted in on good steak. This farmer, who lived just down the road, raised organic turkeys and had eighty acres of unused pasture perfect for cattle. She also had superb fencing. Her name was Carla.
The only thing lacking now was a cow.
In every country other than Argentina and Texas (which often likes to believe it’s a country), I ate local, in terms of breed. In France I ate Limousin steak. In Scotland, I ate Angus and Highland. In Japan, black Wagyu. And in Italy, Chianina and Podolica. Where did that leave things as far as my own country, Canada, was concerned? Was I going to have to hybridize an uptight British bull with an unwilling Catholic French cow to achieve something culturally correct? Fortunately, not. As it happens, there is an authentic Canadian breed of cattle with a very obvious name: the Canadienne.
The breed has been eating Canadian grass and suffering through the bitterest of winters for something like four hundred years. Not long after the French explorer Jacques Cartier discovered the land we now call Quebec, cows were rounded up from the French regions of Brittany, Normandy, and Gascony and shipped over to New France, as it was known back then. Those livestock were not of any specific breed—this was almost two centuries before Robert Bakewell and his ideas about purity and inbreeding came on the scene. Some died, and some thrived, grazing, breeding, and calving until they became a distinctive