Steak - Mark Schatzker [12]
Peter Luger, the famous New York steak house, claims that it has been serving “the finest USDA Prime steaks since 1887.” This cannot be true because the USDA didn’t grade its first beef carcass until 1927. And the reason it did so then was because, by 1927, beef was being produced in the same way as cars, furniture, and clothing—it was being churned out of factories.
It hadn’t always been. Up until 1850 or so, beef was killed locally. Cowboys delivered cattle on the hoof to cities, where butchers would turn each animal into steaks and roasts. Quality control was in the hands of the cowboys. During a cattle drive from the Flint Hills in Kansas, or the Sand Hills in Nebraska, all the way to Chicago or New York City, it was their job to keep the cattle calm, move them at a moderate pace, and graze them the whole way. The cowboys would clop into town sore, bow-legged, their spines herniated, but if the weather had cooperated and luck had been on their side, their cattle would be plump and delicious.
The railways put cowboys out of business. Instead of being shepherded to market, cattle started taking the train. And then a great American industrialist by the name of Gustavus Swift went and changed everything. The appearance to this day of the Swift name on refrigerated eighteen-wheelers on West Texas highways is a testament to one man’s vision and legacy.
Henry Ford gets all the credit for inventing the assembly line, but the truth is that he borrowed the idea from Gustavus Swift, although in Swift’s version it was a disassembly line. Cattle arrived intact and fully operational at his packing plant at Chicago’s Union Stockyards. There they were killed, and their carcasses were carried by an overhead trolley system to various workstations, and at each one a cut was sliced or an organ removed until the entire beast was fully dismantled. Once “dressed,” the beef was sent by refrigerated railcar—another Swift creation—to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or anywhere else beef was in demand.
By the early twentieth century beef was getting cheaper, but it wasn’t always good. Butchers, restaurateurs, and hoteliers ordered beef without ever setting eyes on it or the person who raised it. Some of that beef was excellent, but some was terrible—tough, with a gamy, almost rancid taste. Years earlier, if a customer bought a lousy steak, she could take up the matter with her local butcher. The butcher, in turn, could make sure not to buy any more of those scrawny brown cows with the twisted horns from the cowboy with the heavy beard.
Now beef was coming via Chicago from who knows where. Some came from dairy cows that had spent the last decade getting milked. Some came from emaciated, poorly cared for cows fed on bad pasture. And some came from well-bred steers that had been grazed on lush pasture and, maybe, were fed a little grain, too. So the USDA decided to step in. Starting in 1927, they decreed what beef was delicious and what beef was not.
These pioneering USDA graders were faced with endless lines of beef carcasses of indeterminate quality funneled in from all over the country. How did they determine which ones were the good ones? The best, if most impractical, method would have been to fry up at least a medallion of beef from every cow to see how it tasted. Instead, they determined the quality of a side of beef simply by looking at it. They looked for plump animals that weren’t too old. They looked at the inside of the ribs for fat, which they called feathering. They looked for fat on the flank, which they called frosting. The choicest, fattest, younger animals—amply feathered and frosted—received a grade of Prime.
By the 1960s the USDA was no longer interested in feathering and frosting. Now they would take a side of beef, make an incision between the twelfth and thirteenth ribs, and peer at virgin rib eye. They were looking for little dots and curls of fat. They were looking for marbling.