Steak - Mark Schatzker [122]
I barely registered the comment, as I was already swirling in my own funnel cloud of disappointment. I had picked up the same flaw as Stadtländer and the others: tenderness. The steak was not shoe-leather tough—no one was going to choke eating it—but it wasn’t as tender as I had hoped. When you wanted to swallow, it still required a few chews.
My expectations, admittedly, were ridiculously high. It was unreasonable to expect my first-ever beef to be excellent. But that didn’t stop me from hoping. After all, I owed it to Fleurance.
The good news was that there was still another side of beef aging in Scotty’s gelid cooler. A week later, Stadtländer peeled off the tenderloin, roasted it for a New Year’s Eve dinner, and proclaimed it to be as lean as venison, delicious, and—thank the Lord—tender. Three weeks later, after a grand total of six weeks of colder-than-normal dry aging, Scotty cut the other side. I took two rib steaks home and cooked them that night.
The weeks of hanging had imparted a not-unpleasant musty note to the meat, one you sometimes get in aged steak house steaks. (A lot of steak house types mistake this for genuine flavor in a commodity steak, which it is not.) More important, the calpain enzymes had worked their magic: the steak was now soft on the teeth. By the end of the meal, my wife—who was a vegetarian when I met her—was holding a rib bone in her hand and tearing off the last bits of meat clinging to the bone. She could have passed for Magdalenian Woman.
Every one of Fleurance’s rib steaks was good. One friend even claimed her steak was the best he’d ever eaten. But over subsequent weeks and months, various imperfections announced themselves. The short ribs were too fatty, although whether this was a shortcoming or not depends on how you feel about fat. It was tasty fat, no question—nutty, smooth, and softer than warm butter. The sirloin was lean and challenging—anything over medium rare, and it was a goner. The strip loin was excellent but tiny. And there was too much gristle in the blade steaks. One evening, as my wife and I ate steak and watched hockey on TV, I found a small flap of meat on the inside of a rib steak that tasted like raw oyster. If you closed your eyes, it was raw oyster—pretty good raw oyster at that. I called Allen Williams, who explained that it was a product of dry aging. I had eaten meat that should have been trimmed off the carcass. No big deal, he said.
My daughter Greta, who formerly loved visiting Fleurance—“Daddy’s cow”—to watch her eat apples, became a vocal fan of those rib steaks. When I would tell her we were eating steak for dinner, she would say, “Yay!” and clap her hands. The meat, she proclaimed, was “yummy.” She would finish her little mound of precut rib steak morsels and say, “More steak, Daddy.”
Almost three months to the day before Fleurance was killed, my wife had given birth to a baby girl, whom we named Violet, and a twin brother, Henry. By March, they were on solid food, and the first meat they ever tasted was Fleurance. The preparation was not one an Argentine would respect—the steak was pulsed in the blender and mixed with stewed mango—but the babies loved it. They finished the bowl and smiled, their cheeks streaked with bright orange and flecked with meat.
Feeding Fleurance to my offspring satisfied an inner desire I hadn’t realized I possessed. It feels right and good to chop meat from an animal you have grazed personally and put it into little mouths. Supermarket meat now stared back at me blankly on Styrofoam trays. It seemed alien, all of a sudden. Where has it been?
Our own freezer was full of Fleurance. We ate rib steaks on weekends, braised short ribs, beef