Steak - Mark Schatzker [6]
What I wanted to know was: How did these cows taste?
Delicious, you would think. And with good reason. History is replete with incidents of humans devising ways to make animals more delicious. Somewhere, sometime in ancient Egypt, someone figured out that merely feeding geese wasn’t sufficient—you had to force the grain down their throats, causing their livers to become large and tremendously fatty. More than four thousand years after that eureka moment, millions of geese and ducks the world over have grain funneled down their throats twice a day so that humans may enjoy their ultra-creamy livers, which are known as foie gras. Before a French chef cooks a crayfish alive, he grasps the middle segment of its tail and pulls it off, ripping out the creature’s digestive tract, thus removing any unsavory crunchy bits. The Chinese dispatch fleets of ships to pull sharks out of the oceans and cut their fins off for soup. No other part of the shark, apparently, can be used to make soup, so the sharks are returned to the sea alive but finless, and they sink and die. The greatest instance of cruelty in the name of gustatory pleasure may be found in an unfortunate songbird called an ortolan. The French catch them wild and pluck out their eyes. A night feeder, the blinded bird gorges itself on a diet of millet and figs. Once fattened, it is drowned in cognac and sent to the oven.
The nearest restaurant to Palo Duro Feeders is the El Vaquero. You find it eight miles north on the main street of the town of Gruver, near a Dairy Queen, a Phillips 66 gas station, and a salon called Shear Style. Within the first thirty seconds of your arrival at the El Vaquero, the probability is high that someone within earshot will say, “Y’all.” It has a marvelous terrazzo floor, each square of which is inlaid with the brand of a local rancher. David Bergin was sitting across the table from me, and he pointed out the D. C. Jones brand, which is a D and a C with a line running beneath. (Spanish cowboys tend to have the fancy-looking brands, but you don’t find many of those up in the Panhandle.) Years ago, the floor belonged to a hotel lobby where ranchers came to smoke cigars and talk rancher talk. In between their laconic, hardscrabble sentences, they fired bullets of dark saliva into spittoons on the floor.
The El Vaquero’s menu gets right down to business and lists the steaks at the top, where you’d expect to find salads or soups. Sirloin Steak. Club Steak. Rib Eye Steak. Chicken-Fried Steak. David Bergin recommended the rib eye. It arrived on a small silver platter—regal, festive, suggestive of a Spanish influence—next to a heap of French fries and a grilled hot pepper.
The steak was not from Palo Duro Feeders. On the southern edge of Gruver, there is a hobby-sized feeder called Bob Cluck Pens, but the steak didn’t come from there, either. It was, rather, delivered by refrigerated truck from Amarillo, which is a hundred miles south, by Ben E. Keith Foods.
The Ben E. Keith steak looked the way steak is supposed to: big, gray, and crosshatched with black grill marks. Nestled next to it was a little plastic cup of dark steak sauce, but I opted to eat the steak “dry.” I was there to taste steak, after all, not steak sauce.
I took a bite. It was hot and tender enough, with the merest suggestion of beefiness. After a second or two of unmemorable but easy chewing, an undertone of sweetness became present, but, as undertones go, it wasn’t easy to detect.
In terms of shape, the steak looked like a crude version of Africa, and somewhere near Cape Town was a curl of white fat that was comically easy to cut and glistened on the fork, but didn’t taste of much, either. Still, it was soft and succulent. With each morsel of meat I would include a little wedge of fat.
Halfway through I succumbed, taking the little cup of sauce and drenching the steak. Now it had taste. Now it was meaty. Now it was juicy.
David Bergin poured sauce over his steak before taking a single bite. He was born in 1958, and he can remember some of America