Steak - Mark Schatzker [58]
The problem, of course, is that you have to say something. You can’t consume something as delicious as steak or wine and just sit there in silence.
Steak, it seems to me, tastes more like steak than any plant, fruit, or mineral. Steak is its own flavor note. If someone gave you a grilled mushroom that tasted like steak, you would say, “It tastes like steak.” You would not say, “This mushroom tastes like silage, cream, liver, and fresh cut tree.” Whatever else is going on with steak—340 volatile compounds, at last count—the main attraction is the taste of meat.
I raised the issue, somewhat warily, with Vernet. He agreed. He said flavor is, primarily, a personal experience that is very difficult to communicate. He did not create his tasting sheets so that the whole world could start talking about steak as though it were wine. He drafted them for himself, so he could keep track of all the steak he was eating. He only began handing them out to others because people asked him to. As for all the various shades of beefiness and meatiness that make steak steak, he acknowledged there was a lot of work to be done in this area. “Beef is something we’ve been eating for millennia,” he said, “and yet we have no good way of talking about the way it tastes. It’s actually a cultural disaster.”
That is why everyone loves wine scores. They may be crass. They may take a rich sensory experience and boil it down into a number. But they sure are precise. It may be impossible, in the end, to verbally communicate exactly how a thing tastes, but the whole world understands a score out of a hundred.
While Vernet does not give steaks numerical scores, he has an easier time with assigning letter grades. I asked him to name the best steak among the four we’d just tasted, and he chose the Charolais cross. This was not a case of patriotic bias. If anything, Vernet was inclined to prefer the Angus steak, because he prefers grass-fed beef over grain-fed beef, believing it to be more “interesting.” “It’s like wine,” he says. “There are hundreds of flavors. You never know what the next one is going to bring, and that makes steak exciting. It makes me wonder what I’m going to have tonight.”
I agreed with Vernet’s choice, despite my inability to register the same notes as him. The Charolais cross won the day.
“How would you rate it?” I asked.
“A solid B-plus,” he said. “It was a good, honest steak.”
“Have you ever tasted an A-plus?”
Here, Vernet paused. “If you’re a naive steak lover,” he told me, “you eat A-plus steaks all the time. But once you become an expert, you are never satisfied.”
This was not good news. Here I was, a pilgrim in the Holy Land of steak, reeling from the religious epiphany that the most famous beef breed in the world tastes like bad homemade wine. Worse, according to Vernet, A-plus steak would forever be out of reach, and all because I’d set out to find A-plus steak in the first place. I felt like a character in some absurd Greek tragedy, doomed to walk the earth hungering for a food that did not exist.
Scotland is a pretty country. The roads are so winding that they seem designed to ensure a maximally scenic experience, and the fields are greener than in most other places by orders of magnitude. They are also pleasantly irregular, having been parceled off in an age before right angles, and are separated by fences hewed out of rock or long and commendably trim hedges. A knight in armor on horseback would look less out of place on a Scottish road than a car does. But what would look most natural of all is a golf cart. The entire country is a vision of the golfing afterlife, with epic stretches of fairway and rough, and the odd clump of forest for texture. Fields stretch out to the horizon, covering the rises in the land the way a taut blanket covers an uprise of toes. Looking skyward, you have the feeling