Steak - Mark Schatzker [120]
It was time. Scotty walked me through the meat-cutting room through a door to what is known in packing parlance as “the kill floor.” A food inspector was standing there wearing a yellow hard hat. A helper in a blue hard hat was holding a big knife. Scotty opened a door to the holding pen, and Fleurance appeared. She was in elk mode, ears pricked forward, alert, but not agitated. Without any coaxing, she walked into the knock box, which is something like a big cage. A metal gate closed behind her. She could not go backward or forward. She just stood there, looking curious.
Scotty picked up something that looked very much like a cordless drill but was actually an air-powered dart gun. He loaded a dart and walked over to Fleurance, who was bright and alert but calm as ever. Raising the dart gun to her face, he pointed it between her eyes, said something soothing, and fired. Fleurance dropped to the ground with the abruptness of a sack of flour pushed off the edge of a table. She was utterly still. The man in the blue hard hat walked up to her, bent over, and matter-of-factly slit her throat. The dart had left Fleurance unconscious, but as her blood flowed onto the concrete floor and into a drain she passed into death. Fleurance was no more. She was just a body now, meat that needed to be separated from bone, organs, and hide.
It felt bleak and harsh in there. Death is the most obvious fact of life, the gritty subtext to everything, which we spend all our waking hours pretending doesn’t exist. There was no avoiding death now. Scotty cut off Fleurance’s head. He lopped off her hooves and began pulling her hide off. Death was front and center.
As the hide came down, the mood turned. Scotty had good news. Beneath Fleurance’s brown hide was a layer of creamy and glistening back fat. All morning, Scotty had been chiding me about my grass-, fruit-, and nut-fed lunacy. “It’s gonna be lean,” he kept saying. “I can tell.” But Fleurance was not lean. Scotty walked up to me, holding Fleurance’s warm liver in his hand, looked me in the eye, and complimented me straight up: “I’m impressed.”
An hour later, we were all eating burgers. They were not from Fleurance, who had been cleaved into two sides of beef and was half an hour in to a scheduled two weeks of dry aging in Scotty’s cooler. Fifteen minutes earlier, a tremendous boom had signaled the death of the bison, which was now hanging from its hind legs while we ate, its hide removed only halfway, looking as if someone had yanked down its pants. The bison’s meat was red and muscly beneath its hide. It didn’t have nearly the level of finish that Fleurance had.
Everything had gone according to plan. Fleurance had fattened on grass, fruit, and nuts. Her death was as smooth as death can be. I felt good. I drove back to the city above the speed limit, cranking classic rock from a local station. I phoned Allen Williams to tell him how well it had all gone down. There was still caffeine, cortisol, and adrenaline coursing through my system. It was a natural high.
A week later, the anxiety was back. I called Scotty to find out how the meat was aging, and the news wasn’t good. A severe cold snap had set in, with the temperature outside falling to -18°C (0°F). “The cooler,” Scotty said, “is running at just a hair above freezing. I’m not sure how much aging it’s actually doing.” Calpain enzymes are arrested by cold. If there had been any cold-shortening, the cold snap wasn’t helping any.
In exactly a week, Michael Stadtländer would be hosting a Fleurance-themed dinner at Eigensinn Farm. Postponing was not an option; it was Christmas, and my brother had flown in from New York. I would be cooking Christophe Raoux’s hay sauce, not for the steak—it may be years before I am able to adulterate steak with something other than salt—but for the fatty bone marrow, which Stadtländer loves as much as Magdalenian Woman did.
The morning of the dinner, I drove to Scotty’s. He opened the door