Steak - Mark Schatzker [42]
It is likely not possible to overstate the importance of sauces in French cuisine. In a French kitchen, the sauce chef—le saucier—is the highest-ranking member, performing a task more important even than cooking meat. Of France’s many notable contributions to humanity (bicycles, diesel engines, braille, hot-air balloons, stethoscopes), only its great sauces—Hollandaise, Béarnaise, Béchamel, and so on—convey the extent to which the French take their passions seriously. “Anyone can cook,” Christophe told me, translating a famous French saying, “but to make a sauce you need to be born with the gift.”
The French are not strangers to grilling steak over an open flame, but they are equally enthusiastic about sautéing steak in a pan, and this is what makes a sauce possible. Most of the time, steak is sprinkled with salt and pepper, fried in oil and butter, and served. You can, however, add some other ingredients to the fat, juice, and browned bits left in the pan—wine, cognac, cream—and create a sauce.
Hay is not usually one of those ingredients. Like others around the world, the French think of hay as a food for farm animals, not humans. Not a single French person I asked had ever heard of a hay sauce. Its origin is equally murky for Christophe, who can’t remember who taught him the recipe in the first place, or when. It is almost as though Christophe invented it one night while sleepwalking and woke up to find the recipe on his kitchen table.
One evening in 1997, Christophe invited a couple to dinner. Before the meal, he announced that he would be serving steak with a sauce made out of hay, and the wife of his friend jokingly said, “I’m not a cow.” Christophe cooked, they ate. Afterward Christophe asked the couple how they had enjoyed the meal, and the wife repeated her little quip. Christophe, who sets the international standard for graciousness, responded with a polite laugh. But as he closed the door behind them that night, he thought, C’est fini. It was fini. He has not spoken to them since.
Christophe procured the hay for our meal—a brick-sized quantity will more than suffice—from a farmer he knew outside Paris. It was sitting there in a bowl, and he urged me to take a whiff. The hay smelled sweet and nutty. Christophe sprinkled some water on it and told me to smell it again. The interior of the bowl was now a summer afternoon rainstorm on a farm. “You can smell the soil and the sun,” he said.
“You can hear birds singing,” I said. He looked down at his shoe and pretended to have just stepped in manure.
Hay takes a long time to make. You need to grow grass, cut it, let it dry in the sun, and then bale it. Making hay sauce isn’t much faster. It begins with beef trimmings, the little chunks of meat you lop off a cut of beef to make it perfect. Christophe trimmed a tenderloin supplied by M. Metzger. (The cow came from Normandy, but the breed was unknown.) You need a lot of trimmings to make jus, eleven pounds for a mere one and a half liters. The tenderloin didn’t provide nearly enough, so Christophe grabbed a hunk of ribs and hacked off some meat, handing it over to me to reduce into chunklets. As substances go, Christophe’s jus, I realized, would be somewhat more refined than the “au jus” ladled on to steak at the Big Texan.
Two-thirds of the trimmings went into a hot casserole pot with some olive oil over medium heat. Just like my entrecôte the day before, the steak released its juice, which formed a thin bubbling layer at the bottom of the pot. “The juice has to darken,” Christophe said, “because that’s how you get the sugar out.” As the volume of juice diminished, Christophe took a basting brush and painted down the residue clinging to the sides of the casserole pot—a signature Ducasse move, he explained—to bring every last bit of flavor into the simmering liquid. This technique, he says, is “extremely important for creating a jus.”
Registering some development in the pot, Christophe made an announcement: “Soon, the smell will change.” Abruptly, the aroma became more pungent, and also sweeter. By this point, the