Steak - Mark Schatzker [112]
In my home province of Ontario, a grand total of five dairy farms were listed as stocking Canadiennes. Make that four. The lady at a farm near the town of Cannington didn’t keep Canadiennes anymore because they didn’t get along with her stupider but more productive Holsteins. She did have encouraging news, however: their meat was delicious. “Delicate,” she said, “marbled, and wonderful.” I phoned a farm farther north. A bull calf was available, but I didn’t want veal—I wanted steak. The third farmer turned out to be a raging Canadienne enthusiast, who described them as “half cow, one quarter horse, and one quarter elk.” This time around, I avoided asking the barren heifer question, because I was beginning to feel like an idiot. I explained my plight in the hopes that the farmer might take pity on me and offer up one of his fertile heifers. He suggested some nice bull calves instead. He was about to hang up when I blurted it out: Do you, by any chance, have a barren heifer you could sell me?
“Funny you should ask,” the farmer said, “because I just happen to have two.”
The deal was, if I bought two cows for $600, he’d throw in the bull calf free. A week later, they arrived at Carla’s farm. One was big, one was smaller (though still big). The little calf had skinny legs and delicate, deerlike hooves.
The grass thawed and grew, the cows ate, and the first crate of apples appeared in June, by which point my little herd had names. The dun-colored one was Florimonde and the dark one was Fleurance. Both were named after members of the filles du roi, an ancient group of ladies sent to Quebec by the king of France so that the overwhelmingly male population of sexually frustrated lumberjacks, fur traders, farmers, and soldiers could have wives. A fille du roi named Florimonde Rableau married Pierre Chamard on October 13, 1665. (The Montreal phone book today lists fifteen Chamards.) Fleurance Asserin arrived two years later, but, sadly, never seems to have found a husband.
The two cows were a bovine version of The Odd Couple. Fleurance was curious; Florimonde was skittish. Fleurance got along with the other cows; Florimonde preferred to head-butt them. Fleurance loved apples; Florimonde wouldn’t touch them.
Fleurance would stand in front of a pile of apples and eat one after another after another. After a few weeks of such gorging, her ribs disappeared beneath a layer of flesh. A crate of carrots, which are also sweet and full of sugar, was delivered, and Fleurance loved them, too. Florimonde wouldn’t touch them. Florimonde was not as fat. This was good news for Florimonde, but not for Fleurance.
Grass continued growing. The cows would walk out, tear it off in clumps, and swallow. Later, they would hunker down next to a tree, regurgitate their meal, and chew it more—a bovine technique called chewing the cud (it helps break down cellulose). The grass would grow back, and the cows would chew, swallow, regurgitate, and chew some more. At this rate, my steak wouldn’t be ready for several months.
I needed to deal with my meat hunger now. I needed interim options.
I found one at a farmers’ market. It was a grain-fed steak and, to my great surprise, superb—so much so that I phoned up the farmer who raised it and asked him why his steak tasted way better than everyone else’s. “If you feed ’em too much corn too young,” he said, “they don’t taste right.” His cows got a mild grain feed, no antibiotics, and no growth hormones, a program his family has been using to raise beef since the mid-1970s. Before that, they were walking with the rest of the herd, so to speak, and treating their cattle with a growth hormone called diethylstylbestrol. But when it was linked to cancer, the family decided to raise beef the way they’d been doing it in the 1960s, which means no hormones and almost no corn, because corn requires too much fertilizer. His cows