Steak - Mark Schatzker [96]
The short ribs had been cooking for something like two hours, which made them, in a technical sense, a roast, though I was not prepared to say they were not steak. Beef impaled on a skewer and roasted over an open fire is, in fact, what the word steak originally meant. It’s an old word, borrowed from the Vikings, who undoubtedly relished a good steak. Originally, “steak” referred to meat that had been cooked on a stake in the ground. Steak comes from the same root as stick, and cooking the former on the latter may well be the oldest recipe there is. Magdalenian Woman cooked steak on a stick. So did the Vikings. The first Argentines to eat steak on a stake were the cowboys of the pampas, who are called gauchos, and whose level of mythological/cultural significance in Argentina is equal to, if not greater than, that of cowboys in America. Gauchos rode the plains chasing cattle. When they caught up to them, they cut their Achilles tendons with lances with moon-shaped blades on the ends. The gauchos were mainly after hides and took only as much meat as they needed, leaving most of it to rot. Because they could not drag heavy grills across the pampas, they drove spikes into the ground next to their campfires and cooked steaks, which they ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The oldest steak recipe in the world is a good one. Despite being cooked to well done, the short ribs had a crispy, smoky crust, a soft center, and a creamy finish. This was no feedlot steak.
“It’s good,” I said.
“It could be better,” Pordomingo answered.
The waiter returned with a pile of other steaks, though these had come off the parilla (grill) rather than the asado (fire). They weren’t as tasty, and according to Pordomingo, that had more to do with the steak than with the cooking. Argentine steak hadn’t been giving him much to be happy about lately, and the weather was not helping. Autumn, he explained, sounding more like a rancher than a meat scientist, used to be the best season, agriculturally speaking, but now you couldn’t rely on it. Spring wasn’t rainy enough; summers were getting too hot and too dry. When all cattle eat is grass, the quality of their beef has everything to do with the quality of grass, which has everything to do with the weather.
Stuffed with tira de asado, we drove out to a field to see some weather and grass. In Argentina, grass is very often alfalfa, a legume related to peas and peanuts that offers a superb yield among forage plants. It looks more like a weed than a standard grass and has pretty little purple flowers. I bent down and tore off a piece and put it in my mouth. It tasted sour, but very slightly sweet, too. The weather was indeed terrible. It was so dry a dust cloud followed you when you walked. A herd of cattle was scattered among the alfalfa, but Pordomingo considered this to be a poor example of Argentine grazing.
On the next field over was an Argentine feedlot. Compared with Palo Duro Feeders, it was so small as to seem almost cute, with makeshift pens and feed bunks made out of blue plastic tarp strung over wire. The cattle had all been shipped off to the slaughterhouse a month earlier, but the pens remained a slick of mud and shit, its reek identical to that of Palo Duro Feeders. Pordomingo pointed to a puddle of foul water. “That’s going to get into the water table,” he said. “This is why pen feeding is profitable here. Our environmental costs are lower, our wages are lower, and cattle here cost one-third the price.”
“Are cattle happy in the pens?” I asked, remembering what Kubo-san had said about happy cows tasting better.
Pordomingo shrugged his shoulders. “How could they be?”
I went to a fancy parilla for dinner that night called Parilla Los Pines, which I had scoped out that afternoon, and stared at the asado, which I could see through a window next to my table. Drips of fat were falling from sheets of rib and landing with a small puff in gray ash. On the wall was a framed photo of an elk in a meadow, and another of