Steak - Mark Schatzker [111]
People stopped eating Canadiennes once Angus and shorthorns and other trendy beef breeds started coming over from Britain. And when dairy farmers began connecting their milking machines to the magnificently uddered Holstein breed—which produces gallons and gallons of unremarkable milk—no one had much use for a Canadienne anymore. The breed fell so far out of favor it almost went extinct. But in the last decade or so, artisanal cheesemakers in Quebec realized that Canadienne milk made fantastic cheese that, like the milk it comes from, is rich, creamy, and full of flavor. Canadiennes, furthermore, can take a winter. They can turn grass into milk without having to be supplemented with corn or protein-enriched feed. A Canadienne was starting to sound like a cow worth eating.
But really, a dairy breed?
Dairy breeds are the laughingstock of the beef world. What gets laughed at, specifically, are their skinny butts and small loins. They take too long to get big and walk around in hides that appear to be two sizes too large. But consider this: it has been scientifically proven that some dairy cows produce outstanding steak. For example, there is a documented relationship between milk with high butterfat and marbling. (Whether that’s actually good or not depends, obviously, on how you feel about marbling.) The reason the beef industry doesn’t like dairy breeds isn’t because of the way they taste, but because their yield is terrible. The simple fact is, there’s more money in cows with big butts.
Was it possible that a skinny-butt dairy cow might taste better than a chunky beef breed? A formerly famous dairy breed called the Jersey is renowned for being tender. Jersey is an island off the northern coast of France where some people still speak French, even though it has belonged to Britain for almost a thousand years. If Jersey’s cows could speak, they’d speak French, too, because they originated in the same parts of France as Canadiennes, which look so much like Jerseys that some people call them black Jerseys.
Allen Williams told me that back in the old days, cattle ranchers selling beef breeds like Angus or Hereford would keep a Jersey steer for their personal stash. My father is friends with a man who can remember those days. He is today a meat enthusiast of the first order who can dress his own game, spends large sums on fine shotguns, and travels to the prairie every autumn to blast migrating ducks out of the air. The best steak he ever ate was back on the family farm more than fifty years ago. It came from a grass-fed Jersey, and nothing he’s eaten since at any fancy steak house has come close. If Jerseys were that good, it stood to reason that Canadiennes would be, too.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t have picked a worse breed. Not only are Canadiennes rare—fewer than two hundred purebreds presently walk the earth—but they are also dairy cows. When a calf is born on a dairy farm, two things can happen. If it’s a girl calf, the farmer raises it as a heifer, breeds it to a bull, lets it calve, and then milks it. If it’s a boy calf, the farmer sells it as quickly as possible for veal, because a bull calf literally suckles profits from its mother’s teat. The chances of a dairy farmer having a full-grown steer to sell me were pretty much zero. The chances of a dairy farmer parting with a heifer were even worse.
I had a single faint hope: a barren heifer. Somewhere, I thought, there is a Canadienne heifer that’s having trouble getting knocked up. The possibility, admittedly, was remote, but it was all I had. I called the largest Canadienne farm in Quebec, where a man with the thickest Québécois accent I’ve ever heard picked up the phone. I believe he understood my question, but his response was impenetrable, though his tone strongly