Steak - Mark Schatzker [115]
There were no fancy sauces served at the greatest steak-eating extravaganzas in American history. These were called beefsteaks, and they were held in New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Men—and later, women—would get together in a rented hall, hotel, or restaurant, don butcher’s aprons, and down ridiculous quantities of steak (as well as ridiculous quantities of beer, double lamb chops, and roast kidney wrapped in bacon). A top beefsteak butcher named Sidney Wertheimer was, by today’s standards, a purist. He took whole strip loins, rolled them in salt, broiled them, sliced them, and piled the slices on day-old bread or toast. His sauce? Melted butter, pan drippings, and a few shakes of Worcestershire sauce. (Worcestershire sauce contains fermented anchovies, whose broken-down amino acids would have cranked up the umami in the pan drippings.)
Steak eaters of today do not know what they are missing. At the Big Texan, steaks are not only drenched in “au jus,” they are dusted in Montreal steak seasoning. Montreal is 1,800 highway miles from Amarillo. The seasoning contains spices like coriander, red pepper flakes, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, and dried thyme. The recipe, it is said, comes from Romania, where it was used to cure smoked beef. Jewish immigrants brought it to the New World and used the mix to spice beef briskets, but it eventually found its way onto bland commodity steak.
Some steak houses prefer intense, goopy sauces. Smith and Wollensky makes a steak sauce out of tomato puree, blackstrap molasses, malt vinegar, fresh horseradish, roasted garlic, and chili peppers. At David Burke’s Primehouse, in Chicago, you can order a rib eye dry-aged for seventy-five days and obliterate whatever flavor there may be with a choice of sauces including “Sweet and Tangy Steak Sauce” and “3 Peppercorn Sauce,” which your waiter will plunk down on the table seconds after he plunks down the steak.
Peter Luger Steak House has only two locations, but its intense, goopy sauce is sold in supermarkets and poured on steak all over the country. According to legend, a waiter named Willie Wolfe developed the sauce as a salad dressing in the 1950s—the dawn of the feedlot era. Waiters at Peter Luger will urge you not to let the sauce touch any of their USDA Prime steaks, which are still cooked the old-fashioned way—salted, broiled, and brushed with butter. Their pleadings are ignored. Legions of diners show up at Peter Luger and order a big porterhouse. When it arrives, it is smothered in sauce.
Those diners are not totally stupid. The army of line cooks patting seasoning salt and ladling out “au jus” all across the land are not evil. They are dealing with flavorless commodity steak the only way they know how: by adding flavor. The steak in their hands is a red version of boneless chicken breast: a factory-produced protein-based texture vehicle sold on razor-thin margins. Assembly is required. Steak houses differentiate themselves not with steak, but with themes. Half are cowboy-themed, and the other half opt for an old clubby feel. But they all serve the same fundamental widget. They’re not selling steak. They’re selling a value-added flavor experience that is medieval in pungency.
The flavor of steak today is not the flavor of beef. It is the flavor of mass-produced seasoning blends and sweet-and-sour sauces. It is not a pure savor. And once you’ve tasted real steak, it’s not a good savor, either.
Of course, it’s easy to be a critic when you don’t own cattle. Around midsummer, as the forage settled into serious lushness, the first waves of anxiety struck. On paper, things could not have been going better. The days were alternately sunny and rainy, the soil was moist,