Steak - Mark Schatzker [48]
The Old Oak Hotel had a peculiar habit of not trimming any of the fat off its steak, and Cameron’s strip loin arrived surrounded by a thick frame of it. It was better than any previous steak Cameron had ever eaten, and better than any subsequent steak he would eat. It did not come from a doddie, however, but from a shorter, curlier breed called a Welsh Black.
If what you want is Angus semen of the highest quality, Jim Cameron is the man to know. For Angus steak of the highest quality, he doesn’t have much in the way of recommendations. I got back in my car and drove, on the left side of the road, north, past Dalkeith, past Edinburgh, over a foggy and very cold-looking Firth of Forth, and arrived, finally, in the picturesque town of Perth. Perth is not famously associated with doddies. It is miles from Angus, and even farther from Aberdeen. But on a majestically named street called Kings Place, across from a big park near the train station, stands a stately sandstone edifice called Pedigree House, which is the home of the Aberdeen-Angus Cattle Society.
Inside, you can stand face-to-face with Old Jock, the first bull ever entered into the Aberdeen-Angus herd book. He lives eternally in an antique painting, and his midsection is so beefy it calls to mind the images at Lascaux. Standing watch over a winding staircase is the mounted head of a bull named Paris, still soft to the touch after more than a hundred years. He was the grand champion at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1878, which caused quite the stir. French farmers had never before seen a bull with no horns and claimed that Paris (the bull) was not, in fact, bovine at all but some other kind of furry creature. When the trophy, a large and ornate silver bowl, was nevertheless awarded to the Scottish contingent, the French got their revenge. Ringing the prize were several busts of Paris, but unlike the real champion bull, the likenesses on the trophy all had horns.
The trophy had been missing for decades, but recently it turned up in the garage of an elderly lady who’d passed away, and now it sits on the walnut table in the society’s boardroom, which is festooned with other adoring images of famous doddies, including paintings of the Angus bull that was presented to Napoleon Bonaparte; the oldest ever Angus cow, Old Grannie, who lived to the ripe old age of thirty-six, and was finally killed—and partially cooked—by a bolt of lightning; and a cow named Erica, considered by many to be the finest specimen in the history of the breed. At the head of the table, a walnut bookcase holds the Aberdeen-Angus herd books, the early editions so old as to look biblical. Erica’s entry, like all the very old ones, is handwritten. The nineteenth-century script is looping and strikingly elegant, but nearly illegible. I studied an entry for a female born on January 4, 1854: Blossom, daughter of Dewdrop and Rob Roy, bred by the trustees of the late Robert Scott Balywillo. How did Blossom taste? I wondered. Even if she’d lived as long as Old Grannie—at which point she probably wouldn’t have tasted good at all—there would still be more than a hundred years standing between myself and Blossom’s potentially excellent steak.
The president of the Aberdeen-Angus Cattle Society is a wiry Scot named Ron McHattie. We sat down at the walnut table, surrounded by no fewer than eleven bronze statuettes of doddies and next to a painting of an Angus cow so extravagantly fat that she would have had difficulty walking. We talked steak. Or we attempted to, at least, but McHattie confirmed that there wasn’t much to talk about. Scotland may be home to the world’s most famous beef breed, but Scottish steak is in a period of decline. I walked in expecting McHattie to