Steak - Mark Schatzker [91]
As it happens, there is a country where the cattle are famous for eating grass. It is a big country, the second biggest on its continent and the eighth biggest in the world. More than a fifth of it—an area the size of France—is grass-growing prairie of serious repute, an inland sea of pasture that locals refer to by an old native word, pampa. It is a country with fifty-five million cattle but only forty million people, and the reason its people keep so many cows is because they love to eat them. They are the world’s greatest Beef Loyals.
The country is Argentina. By the end of February of any given year, a typical Argentine male has already eaten as much steak as a Japanese man will eat that entire year. By the end of July, he will have lapped an American. And by the end of December, a typical Argentine will have consumed no less than 150 pounds of beef. Argentines feel about steak much like the Plains Indians did about bison meat—it is the only meat. In Spain, the word for “meat” is carne, but if you walk into a butcher shop in Argentina and ask for carne, the butcher will present you with cuts of beef. Lamb, pork, and veal must be referred to specifically by name.
Argentina sounded like my kind of place. Then my mother broke a piece of news that made it sound even better: I was related to Mordecai Sternbach.
Some context:
Around the year 1780—half a century or so after Macelleria Falorni, the butcher shop in Greve in Chianti, opened its doors for the first time—a baby boy named Mordecai Sternbach was born in a town called Drohobycz, which was then part of Austria and is now in Ukraine. In 1806, Mordecai Sternbach had a daughter named Pessel who had a son named Leib Alter who had a son named Isaac who had a daughter named Mira who gave birth to my father’s mother, Helen. But Mordecai Sternbach wasn’t done having daughters. In 1825, his wife bore Ester, who had a daughter named Chaje Tille who had a son named Ignatz who had a son named Heinrich whose daughter, Vera, bore a daughter named Vicky, who, according to the laws of heredity, is my fifth cousin. (I’m pretty sure, anyway.) According to my mother—who, you will have by now deduced, has a penchant for genealogy that would put a Mormon to shame—there was a high probability that Vicky, too, loved steak and ate a lot of it. The same red tide of history that wiped out my father’s family and returned aurochs to the forests of Germany had sent the few remaining members of Vicky’s side of the family to Buenos Aires.
I had a fifth cousin, apparently, who lived in the country that had more cattle than people. She was a biochemist. She was married to a chemical engineer named Steve. Most important, she sent my mother an e-mail saying she was excited at the prospect of getting to know a person with whom she shared a great-great-great-great-grandfather and extended an invitation to me to pay them a visit, which included a promise to dine at a steak house. And so, thanks to the reproductively inclined Mordecai Sternbach, I found myself boarding an overnight plane headed south, over the equator and then some, to the land of steak.
By the time I woke up, Brazil was petering out and Argentina was moving into view, an unfurled sheet of green cordoned off into giant squares with the occasional river restating nature’s preference for curved lines. It was an awesome display of agricultural horsepower down there, an expanse of ruminant-growing grassland that stretched unbroken to the horizon. In the relentless prairie, the only trees that grew were in fecund river basins, huddled in bushy little clumps that, from 39,000 feet, looked oddly like pubic hair.
Down on the ground in Buenos Aires, the similarities between my fifth cousin Vicky and me were uncanny. We both loved coffee, but neither of us could drink so much as a tablespoon after lunch without spending half the night staring at the