Steak - Mark Schatzker [56]
Vernet was not stumped. He was tasting plenty. For well over a minute, he just sat there chewing and concentrating, making the occasional notation with his pencil. Finally, he spoke: “For me it’s a nice steak, it’s a pleasing steak. It’s honest. It has a nice smell. It’s not fresh, but slightly mature. I find it quite short on the juiciness. It’s a steak in a hurry—you have to swallow it quickly to enjoy it.” He kept going. “The tenderness, I find it easy, though not specifically tender. The chew is short, and there was no springiness. Fibrousness was stringy”—we agreed on something—“the grain, I found it a little bit grainy.”
He paused for a breath, then addressed the subject I could not: flavor. “I found it sweet and salty, and sourness on the finish, but a short sourness. It was slightly more salty than sweet. Within the green, a slight what we call ‘forest,’ not a green vegetal flavor, but if I had to say it was a fruit or vegetable, I would say a dry flower. No earthy flavor, no liver flavor, no gamy flavor whatsoever. On the nuts I would say hazelnuts—dry hazelnuts, not the green ones. No blood flavor. Roast was very discreet, despite the nice browning. There’s a light caramel. On the sweetness, very discreet, so flower-minus. And dairy I would say semi-skim. You can feel a little bit of dairy flavor, but it’s not overly powerful. And I didn’t put anything for aftertaste, because I think it’s quite short. But I would not put it as flash, I would put it as short.”
In stark and alarming contrast, I found the steak merely uninteresting. I detected precisely none of the flavors that Vernet had. Was I merely inexperienced? Was his tongue a more sensitive tasting instrument than my own? Do two people taste steak the same way?
Steak number two came from a Limousin heifer and sizzled in much the same manner as its predecessor. But it did not taste the same. It was, comparatively, dry and tough. Vernet found the smell “fresh,” and the taste moved from salty to sour and then bitterness. “I would put it as green woods and silage. I found a slight liver flavor, but it didn’t stay long. I didn’t find any other flavor, not even dairy flavor. I think it finished on a very green shoot flavor.”
Under flavor, I circled “Green woods” and “silage,” but only because Vernet had cited them. I doubt that I would have come to them on my own, in part because silage—fermented grass—is not a smell I’m familiar with.
That is one of the great pitfalls of the pastoral language approach: obedient mimicry. Flavor descriptions uttered by people with renowned palates have a funny way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. If a big, important critic pronounces that a particular wine has a bouquet of honey, toasted oak, and cherry blossoms, then all over the world, aspirational types who live in big cities—people who spend almost no time in the country smelling things like honey, toasted oak, or cherry blossoms—drink that particular wine and all end up detecting the same aromas and notes.
The third steak was an Angus-Limousin cross—Scottish father, French mother. It didn’t perform as well as the others, though it didn’t embarrass itself, either. Vernet found an initial sourness that gave way to the aroma of honey, though not the taste of honey, and it finished quite strongly, he thought, on raw fresh mushrooms. “I would say that it’s a ladies’ steak,” he pronounced. “It’s discreet, and not my favorite, but similar to the filet.” Women, he informed me, prefer the tender, milder tenderloin, while men prefer fattier, more robust-tasting rib eyes. This rib eye, hence, was mild enough to suit the tastes of a lady.
All the steaks, thus far, had come from cows that had been fattened on grain. The last of the bunch was the reason I had traveled to Scotland. It was pure Angus. It had been finished in the true Scottish manner: on grass. It was also, somewhat unexpectedly, the most marbled of the lot, and this was a surprise because grain-fed steaks