Steak - Mark Schatzker [37]
I started thinking about my father. The Nazis took his father away from him. Eating their racially pure steak seemed like the rudest kind of affront to the life my father lived, and the life his father was denied.
I thought about the aurochs. Although one of them had almost gored me, his playfulness, I had to admit, had nothing to do with my partial Jewishness. Back on Göring’s game reserve, the Heck aurochs weren’t exactly respectful of all things Aryan. They trampled some bicycles. They commandeered a feed trough and gobbled hay and oats intended for horses. They attacked a hiker, not to mention Göring’s forest manager, a man I think we may safely assume was not Jewish. Aurochs are equal opportunity gorers. So long as I made sure to visit them with their much-loved keeper Xavier Chanssard next to me and didn’t go near the mothers during calving, they meant me no harm. There was a cube of cooked aurochs muscle on the end of my fork, so if anything, the opposite was true.
(It also may be worth noting at this point that Göring’s boss and the greatest racist the world has ever known—Adolf Hitler—was a proud vegetarian.)
I put the steak into my mouth. Aurochs, reconstituted aurochs, Heck cattle—whatever you call them—make fine eating. The taste was not gamy but had that quality so absent in the Texas commodity steaks: beefiness. It had other qualities, too, including an herbal note and an almost salty flavor, even though not a grain of salt had touched it.
The Limousin steak presented with a smoother texture, but took as long to chew. It was equally juicy—which is to say juicy, but not memorably juicy—and the flavor was sweeter, less powerful, and faded more quickly on the tongue. In short, it was milder.
The enormity of the two steaks turned out to be a nonissue. After several minutes of chewing and swallowing, I looked down and discovered I was over halfway through both and showing no signs of getting full. Another week of this, I thought, and my stomach would be as distended as an arctic explorer’s. I took a sip of beer and ate a few forkfuls of fried potatoes. Then it was back to the steak.
The aurochs was flavorful. The aurochs was juicy. But it was not perfect. Maybe it was because the beast I was eating, having most recently grazed upon the thin spring forage, was lean. Maybe I was channeling Magdalenian Woman. Maybe I’d been eating too much lean protein—a seeming impossibility in France—and was craving kilocalories. Whatever the reason, the aurochs seemed deficient in a single attribute: it could have been a touch more fatty.
No one knows quite how the people of Lascaux cooked their meat, but of one thing we can be certain: French cuisine has come a long way. Over the intervening sixteen thousand years, during which time the French became diverted by wine, cheese, liqueurs, fashion, existentialism, and so on, their love of steak has stayed true. The country famous for pâté, quiche, and untold grand desserts may bring to mind visions of effete, beret-wearing Variety Rotators, but the French happen to be Europe’s great Beef Loyals. They eat more beef than the Germans, the Italians, and the Spanish, and almost twice as much as the British. One French steak house chain, the Hippopotamus Restaurant Grill, has 121 locations in France, or one restaurant for every 500,000 French persons, a higher incidence of steak house than is found in the United States with Ruth’s Chris Steak House (1 to 2.5 million), Morton’s (1 to 3.4 million), and Lone Star Steakhouse (1 to 2 million). It is only slightly less popular than the Outback Steakhouse, which has erected one steak house for every 400,000 Americans. Another French steak house chain, La Boucherie (fifty-eight locations), lists a “Duet of Marrow Bones” on its menu, suggesting that aspects of the Paleolithic