Steak - Mark Schatzker [135]
It was time, at long last, to head for the Charco Broiler to eat. The restaurant was Grandin’s choice. She likes it because it isn’t part of a chain and because if you order a steak medium rare, it will arrive that way, a feat of culinary expertise beyond the reach of all too many steak houses. The Charco Broiler served its very first steak in 1957, and the present owner is the nephew of the man who opened the restaurant. In more than half a century, it has been through numerous renovations and additions, but its sunken lounge, which has little round tables, low seating, and subdued lighting, is as fine an archaeological relic of the 1970s as the caves at Lascaux are of the Upper Paleolithic.
The waiter came out and presented the raw steaks. They were a deeper red than feedlot steaks and marbled enough to grade Choice, one step below Prime. These hailed from Kansas, finished on a stretch of grass next to the cabin featured in Little House on the Prairie, where the book’s author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, lived with her family. (The original cabin is gone, but a replica stands as a local tourist attraction.) Tallgrass packaging does not, at this point, specify pasture of origin, although the company is considering including that. It nevertheless keeps all the information in-house—as well as a DNA sample of every single cow—which is how Williams knew the steaks we were about to eat might taste something like steaks Laura Ingalls Wilder ate more than a century ago.
After the salad course, the steaks were returned to the table sporting a gorgeous Maillard crust. Temple Grandin took a bite and did not waste much time abstractifying. “Mmm,” she said. “That’s good. That’s really good. This reminds me of the beef I ate in Argentina,” she said, which she’d earlier told me was the best she’d ever eaten. She took another bite. “You sure get lots of flavor.”
Where was that flavor coming from?
Not marbling. Grade-wise, the Tallgrass steaks were low Choice. And yet the steaks had a rich, almost smoky flavor, one that was exponentially deeper than the USDA Prime I ate in Oklahoma, or even the Matsusaka Special Beef I had in Japan.
I believe I knew the reason why. I now felt I understood, at least dimly, the food I had been chasing and eating for so long. I had formulated what you might call the Grand Unified Theory of Steak.
Humans evolved into meat eaters millions of years ago. We became good at catching and killing animals, but our ability to eat them and digest them never caught up to our skill as hunters, perhaps because we never gave up on fruits and vegetables. We don’t have the teeth of a carnivore, which is one reason we mastered fire, because cooking makes meat easier to digest. We never evolved the right enzymes to digest high doses of protein; too much lean meat will kill us. That’s not something we worry about these days, because we have access to more fat and carbohydrates than nature ever thought possible. But back when Magdalenian Woman was walking around the south of France, fat was all humans thought about.
We like fatty meat because fatty meat was the purest form of dietary energy available back in the days of hunting and gathering. Fat meant survival, which is why fat receptors on the tongue trigger a pleasure response in the brain. The human requirement for fat may have even played a role in the evolution of intelligence. Unlike eagles, wolves, lions, snakes, and so forth, humans don’t hunt anything that moves. Humans hunt fat, which meant we had to become visually discerning. That explains the corpulent aurochs on the walls at Lascaux.
Our palate is even more discerning than