Steak - Mark Schatzker [60]
That butcher shop is gone now, I am sad to report, a victim of a new mega-supermarket that opened down the road, which sells lean steak aged for four days on Styrofoam trays.
Pan drippings are another of modernity’s victims. Several months before leaving on my trip, I attempted to track down some Scottish pan drippings by phone, thinking that in the land of deep-fried Mars Bars my chances might be good. To no avail. Everyone could remember an aunt or a grandmother who kept a greasy pan on the stove, or a jar of fat on the windowsill. But no one said, “Yes, I can get you drippings.” So I asked PJ, a Canadian transplant, to collect some. What he’d produced so far was indeed impressive. All I needed now were delicious Scottish rib eyes.
Two days later, I had them. Acquiring these steaks required a considerable amount of time on the phone, and a good deal more in the car, but there they were, sitting on PJ’s kitchen table, waiting to be laid in hot, aged fat. I had amassed four rib eyes altogether, and four pope’s eyes, too—“pope’s eye” being the local, not to mention baffling and unappetizing, name for rump steak. (Farther south, over the border in Dorset, a pope’s eye refers to a cut the Scots call a salmon-cut silverside, which is called bottom round in America. Go figure.) Charlotte handed me two pans. I put them on burners turned up to high, then spooned a gob of fat into each, which oozed across the hot metal.
The steaks came from two farms, the first of which, in another stroke of geographic good fortune, was just outside Kelso. Hardiesmill was recommended by Laurent Vernet for the simple reason that it is one of the few farms that sells 100 percent pure Angus beef that is fed on grass. Steak doesn’t get more Scottish than that.
As though being paid to market their own farm, black doddies (and a few red ones) were out in the fields munching grass when I pulled in to Hardiesmill. The farm is run by Alison and Robin Tuke, and the herd originally belonged to Alison’s father, who was the kind of man who walked into a restaurant and asked what breed the steak was from, and would then walk out if the waiter didn’t know the answer. Alison is a trained florist and Robin is a former telecom executive, but they now raise beef that they like to think of as premier cru—a term the French use to denote top-drawer wine.
We walked out into the field to have a look at all those doddies. Cows grazed next to calves, eating around the manure patties, where the grass grew in tall tufts. Over in the far corner was the bull, a rippling immensity, with muscles so numerous and defined he looked as if he’d just lumbered off a photo shoot for the front cover of MuscleMag.
We drank tea and talked steak in the Tukes’ kitchen. From the beginning, their goal has been to raise the kind of traditional Scottish beef you don’t find anymore. They once gave some to an old butcher who works down the road, who said, “I haven’t tasted beef like this in thirty years.” Their doddies are fed hardly any grain, just a pound of barley a day during winter, to help the vitamins go down. We visited their beef fridge, which is in their barn, and I was handed several steaks descended from Erica, the most famous cow in the history of the breed, whose painting I had seen at the Aberdeen-Angus Cattle Society’s boardroom. Alison later handed me a sheaf of papers to prove it.
I was nevertheless apprehensive. The grass-fed steak in Texas tasted like river bottom. The grass-fed steak in Vernet’s flat tasted like bad homemade wine. What would this stuff taste like? Sour milk? Vinegar? Rancid anchovies?
The steak looked okay: bright red and marbled with yellowy wisps of fat. When raw, it had a mild beefy smell.
Lineage, apparently, matters. That steak was outstanding—fabulous, a eureka moment, an Aberdeen-Angus tour de force. It was tender, juicy—both initial and sustained—and hugely flavorful, a flavor that was smoky at first, then resonantly beefy, bursting with juice on each chew. There