Steak Tartare Rides Again

- cross-posted from Project Foodie

by Betty Fussell

When I was in Paris last June, for the first time in years, I was surprised to find a long-loved friend on the menu of every bistro I went to — Steak Tartare. I’d forgotten how long it’d been missing from the menus of cafes and restaurants across America. In fact, it had been missing from my own kitchen. One forkful, however, and I remembered how passionate our friendship once had been.

My guess is that raw beef disappeared from the menus of America around 2003, about the time the Mad Cow scare came in. For decades, Steak Tartare had been a fabled item at places like the “The 21 Club,” but that was before raw fish became chic and raw beef and raw eggs taboo. Of course the E.coli tainted hamburgers of The Jack-in-the-Box chain in the mid-90s did nothing to reassure a nervous public, nor did last year’s recall of several hundred million pounds of ground beef from a California Meat Packing Company.

But does that mean we should Eat Beef No More? Of course not. It does mean that we should choose our beef carefully — choose it for quality, which puts top priority on flavor and wholesomeness. Industry’s runaway commodification of all our factory-raised foods, but most egregiously meat and poultry, has tried to con the public into equating Cheap with Good. That is dead wrong. Cheap is as cheap does, and cheap comes from mass production, which is the opposite of raising calves and cows properly — without hormones or antibiotics, feeding them properly on grass, processing them properly on a scale that is humane, manageable and safe.

Quality meat guarantees that the meat you buy is fresh meat, not fiddled with chemically to prolong its shelf life. In other words, we must distinguish between artisan beef and commodity beef. Common sense tells us that we must expect to pay more for real food than faux food. The French have always been smart about that.

Thank god artisan beef has returned to this country as part of the greening movement. At last, we have other places to buy meat than in behemoth supermarkets. At last, we are restoring heritage breeds, not just breeds that put on weight fast and are sent to market as obese teenagers. At last, we are replacing a forced-fed grain diet with a ruminant’s natural one of grass. At last, we’re letting cows put on flesh in their own sweet time, not according to the slaughter-house schedule. At last, we can restore Steak Tartare to our menus by choosing our beef carefully from a source that we trust, whether we buy it already ground or grind the cut ourselves.

One of the most luscious meats in the world  comes from the increasingly popular breed called Wagyu (sometimes called Kobe because that’s the port this Japanese breed of beef was originally shipped from). This breed (even when it’s crossbred with Angus and other American breeds) is so highly marbled that it makes our USDA scale of select, choice and prime seem primitive. Some call it white beef because a Wagyu steak looks like a slab of white speckled with red. I call it beef butter because it is a thing unto itself, like foie gras.

To make a Tartare of ground Wagyu is to eat beef butter highly seasoned by spices yet smoothed by the richness of mayonnaise. By choosing a source you can trust, you can banish fear and guarantee pleasure, knowing you’re going to get maximum bang for whatever bucks you pay.

Wagyu Steak Tartare
From Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef by Betty Fussell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).

* 1½ pounds American Kobe sirloin, finely chopped
* 3 anchovy fillets, chopped
* 1 tablespoon chopped onion
* 1 tablespoon capers, rinsed
* 2 tablespoons chopped parsley leaves
* 1 large egg yolk
* 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
* 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
* 1 teaspoon cognac
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* ½ teaspoon black pepper
* Tabasco to taste
* Toast points

With a sharp knife, chop the meat as fine as you can and then chop again. (A processor will turn this beef to mush.) Next chop the anchovies, onion, capers, and parsley until they are uniform in size. In a large bowl beat the egg yolk with the mustard, Worcestershire, and cognac. Gradually beat in the olive oil until the mixture thickens. Add pepper and Tabasco. Add the meat and chopped ingredients and mix well but very gently with your hands to keep the meat light and air-filled. Form gently into four to six patties and top each with a toast point set upright. Yield: 4 servings.

A few online sources: snakeriverfarms.com, preferredmeats.com, lobels.com, debragga.com, heritagefoods.com, ranchfoodsdirect, com, lacensebeef.com, lasatergrasslandsbeef.com, eatwild.com.

Correction to “Raising Steaks”

by Betty Fussell

I’ve just heard from my friends Nicolette and Bill Niman that I’ve  made an inadvertent but egregious error in my text of Raising Steaks that I want to correct immediately because it raises an important issue in the raising of livestock.

After visiting Bill’s breathtakingly beautiful ranch in Bolinas, CA, a a few years ago, I’d gone on to visit the small Purple Sage Feedlot he’d used for his cattle in Caldwell, ID.  This was run by a knowledgeable and caring couple, Rob and Michelle Stokes, who now work with the many kinds of livestock the Nimans now raise exclusively on the pastures at Bolinas.

Back then, Rob had explained to me that the two common feeds standard in the cattle industry were feather meal and distiller grains. But I made a big mistake when I quoted Rob as saying “The two common feeds we use …”(page 114).

I’d never heard of feather meal, so Rob explained that it is made from hydrolyzed chicken feathers and is used because this protein content degrades slowly in a cow’s rumen and thereby helps utilize the animal’s entire gastrointestinal tract. What’s wrong with feather meal is that chicken feathers are an animal byproduct and at that time I didn’t realize the importance of this issue in matters of beef safety, not to mention matters of animal welfare in general.

After I learned a lot more in the course of writing this book about the relation of cattle feed to cattle diseases like E.coli and Mad Cow, I should have realized something was wrong with my notes if I had Rob saying he used this byproduct as a common feed. I quoted him wrongly and I’m particularly sorry because the Nimans, and the Stokes, have always strongly opposed feeding feather meal to animals.

Bill Niman first created his company out of concern for the health and wellbeing of livestock raised for meat and as an alternative to the increasingly scary methods used by the meat industry. Nicolette Hahn spent her lawyer’s career working on the impact of industrial food systems on our environment, as you can read in her new book,  Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (see my earlier post).

That they are living that life as a married couple, with the Stokes living nearby, well — even though Bill has recently lost his own corporatized company, it still seems like a Technicolor ending with goats romping in the grass and Heidi running to her grandpa with some fresh cheese. We count on the Nimans and Stokes of this world to provide alternatives to that buffalo stampede of the entire industrialized food chain over the cliff.

Peanut Butter & Salmonella Don’t Mix

by Betty Fussell

Must our daily pleasure in food be constantly poisoned by fear of — well, poison? It was one thing when kids were warned off tomatoes because of salmonella poisoning, and I’m sure there were a number of kids happy to give up spinach for fear of E. coli. But peanut butter?

The marriage of peanut butter and jelly is so sacred to the American child that it is blasphemed by the coupling of peanut butter and salmonella. But at least the peanut butter scare gets beef off the hook as the major source of food terror, from E. coli to Mad Cow disease. How in the face of these daily headlines about the simplest of our daily foods can we remain so clueless about the need for CHANGE in our procedures for food safety?

The absurdly divided jurisdiction between the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (which handles meat, poultry, eggs), and the FDA’s scattershot regulations for all the rest of our food, has been a joke for decades. But alas, people sicken and die from such jokes. The laugh’s on us.

We have never had a commonsensical, well-organized, well-funded unified program devoted to the safety of the foods, domestic and imported, that we put in our mouths each day. Even our new Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, has suggested, though barely above a whisper, that it may be time for a single agent to handle food safety in this country.

“T-I-M-E?” I want to shout. It was time 100 years ago. It is always time to care more about the health of the community than the profit of vested interests. There’ll always be wicked people, like Snow White’s stepmother, to deliberately poison an apple, but this wholesale careless poisoning by default is far more monstrous. I want someone to take responsibility, like a Secretary of Food or a Secretary of Eating. I want someone to care.