Steak - Mark Schatzker [49]
What I could do, McHattie told me, was visit a Scottish supermarket and buy a certified Aberdeen-Angus steak. But that in itself was no guarantee of breed purity. Genetically speaking, it was required to be merely half Angus. Still, that is a far cry better than what gets sold in the United States (and Canada) as Certified Angus Beef, whose specifications require nothing in the way of genetics or heredity. For an American cow to qualify as Certified Angus Beef, it must possess certain carcass characteristics—fine and ample marbling, a well-shaped rib eye, not too much back fat, and so forth. The cow must also have been—here it comes—at least 51 percent black. The thinking is that since Angus cattle are black, a cow that is mostly black is mostly Angus—the logical equivalent of proclaiming that since cats have fur, any animal that is at least half fur-covered must therefore be a cat. Angus cattle, it so happens, do not enjoy a monopoly on blackness. Black Simmentals are black. Welsh Blacks are black. Black Charolais are black, and so are Galloways, Salers, and black Limousins. A lot of Holsteins, the famous black-and-white dairy cows, possess blackness in excess of 51 percent. (More than one cattle industry type has told me that thousands of Holstein steers—which, being male, can’t be milked—are fed flaked corn and sold as Certified Angus Beef.) Some Angus cattle, furthermore, are not black. There is a gene for redness in Angus DNA, and it is recessive, which means that two flagrantly pure black Angus cattle can produce a calf that will be as red as the morning sun. If you drive by a herd of black doddies grazing the electric green Scottish countryside, look hard enough, and you will see red ones. Some believe red Angus represent the very purest strain, because a red Angus bull with a red Angus cow will only produce red calves, whereas with black parents you don’t know what you’re getting. And yet in the United States, a pedigree, award-winning red Angus steer—so devoutly Angus as to bring to mind visions of bagpipers marching over heather—would nevertheless fail to qualify as Certified Angus Beef.
The problem in Scotland, McHattie explained, is that no one has any idea what constitutes good beef anymore. There is historical precedent. Three hundred years ago, most Scots couldn’t afford to eat meat. What little they did consume was likely from a deer someone poached. Butcher shops didn’t appear until the 1700s, when they were called flesh mongers. The Scots kept sheep for milk and wool—not meat—and cattle were either milked or driven to market and sold. Religion didn’t help; Presbyterianism does not favor indulgent forms of eating. All too often, their prized doddies ended up being eaten by the hated English.
Among the very few Scots who did eat steak were the drovers. During cattle drives that would rival those yet to come in America, they cooked steaks on shovels held over a wood fire. But for most Scots, the only beef they ever ate was in the form of blood. During the bone-chilling damp of the Scottish winter, they would draw blood from their cattle, mix it with milk and oats, and boil it into a pudding. (The nearest thing to it today is a British breakfast sausage called black pudding, which is in itself tasty enough to warrant a trip to Scotland.)
Three hundred years ago, those who toiled outdoors or worked in poorly heated stone buildings—the entire population of Scotland, in other words—prized fat. The Scottish feel very differently about fat nowadays, McHattie told me, and that’s another big problem. For decades, the government has been concerned over the legendary unhealthiness of the Scottish diet and has been telling the people their steak should be lean and red. The carcasses that grade the best—and therefore pay the farmer the most money—are lean. While a USDA beef grader is on the lookout for white, his British counterpart wants to