Steak - Mark Schatzker [59]
I crested a hill and beheld yet another panorama in green. It is impossible, I said to myself, that such a fine chunk of geography could not produce an excellent piece of beef. I was willing to concede artificial vaginas to the French. But not steak. I had to keep looking.
I drove back south to Kelso, the little town next to the stud farm where I met Jim Cameron. As luck would have it, I know someone who lives there. PJ—short for Peter John, though no one calls him that—and I had spent a lot of time together back in our university years, most of it inebriated. I found him living in a cute house in a cute town with his wife, Charlotte, and two daughters, whose cuteness surpassed their surroundings. He was fairly shocked to hear what Big Al and company were up to just down the road. We went out for steak, as I felt I needed to get out of the lab, so to speak, where the bright light of scientific inquiry was ruining the experience. In the fresh air of the real world, I thought, steak would be satisfying again. We hit a local pub, and the steaks were awful—dry, burned, and cardboardlike. I could almost hear Laurent Vernet saying, “I told you so.” We salvaged the outing by draining many pints of beer and glasses of wine, the exact number of which remains uncertain.
The next morning, PJ showed me the fat he’d been stockpiling. In a jar in his fridge was an off-white blob of goo that looked like a homemade lava lamp. I picked it up, contemplating the oleaginous substance inside. “Fine work, PJ,” I said.
For the last several months, every time meat had been roasted in the oven, PJ and Charlotte retained the fat and poured it into a jar. This was at my request. The name for this substance is pan drippings, and in this day and age the vast majority of them are thrown out. But it was not always thus. In the age when fat had value—an era stretching from at least the Paleolithic to roughly fifty years ago—people stored pan drippings in jars so that the fat would live to fry again. They used pan drippings to fry potatoes or as the base for a gravy. Some people, bless them, would even spread the stuff on toast.
I learned the value of pan drippings years earlier, when my wife—at the time, still just my girlfriend—and I were living in London. I was working at a magazine called Group Travel Organiser, which was, as its name suggests, a publication best avoided. I would spend each eternal workday writing soul-destroying stories about, say, what happens when a group of retirees from rural Birmingham plans a trip to Madame Tussauds wax museum and the bus breaks down on the motorway. I was given an hour for lunch every day, and a few blocks up the road was a butcher shop. The beef was Scottish, and if you phoned ahead, the butcher would make you a rib eye sandwich. That sandwich was the only aspect of life at Group Travel Organiser that I did not detest. I so relished those rib eye sandwiches that I forced myself to consume them sparingly, not wanting to exhaust a resource so precious. I would spend a day or two anticipating the next rib eye sandwich, wishing it could come sooner, and the day after it was eaten, I would buy a grease-stained paper cone of fish and chips and lament the rib eye’s passing. Eventually I started eating them more often, and soon I was phoning in orders whenever the craving struck, as often as three or four times a week. This in no way diminished the cravings.
I was not the sandwich’s only fan—by noon a line typically stretched out the butcher’s door. But one day, I got there as the lunch rush was tapering, so I took the opportunity to ask the butcher his secret. “The drippings stay in the pan,” he said, which was a nice way of saying that the black iron pan behind the cash register never got washed. The drippings stayed put, congealing, coagulating, and maturing, becoming more replete with beefiness with each successive sandwich. I went home and described the technique to my wife. Her verdict: