Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef
Mark Schatzker
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0143119389
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
STEAK. Nothing that humans have ever put into their mouths in the name of nourishment has been the subject of such devotion, such flights of gastronomic ecstasy, or such grave connoisseurship as this most adored of meats. Now Mark Schatzker, an award-winning food and travel writer, takes readers on an odyssey to four continents, across thousands of miles, and through hundreds of cuts of steak, prepared in dozens of ways, all in a quest for the perfect piece. Steak is an impassioned, funny, and enlightening look at the fate of this beloved food.
levity. There is only one dish I know of that tops steak: my wife, Laura McLeod, whose mere smile gets me through the valleys and back up the mountain. Laura, for a former vegetarian, you sure have eaten a lot of steak. You may not be quite up to three and a half pounds of beef a day, but you will always be my Magdalenian Woman. BIBLIOGRAPHY For a list of where or how to buy some of the steaks described in this book, visit www.steakthebook.com. Ackerman, Diane. The Zookeeper’s Wife: A
answered the phone at Saltgrass Steak House could not say precisely what salt marsh the cattle were grazed on, so I asked to speak to someone who did know the answer. Another man soon got on the line and told me that Saltgrass Steak House used feedlot beef. I wasn’t totally out of luck, however, because 250 miles south in northeast Texas was a man named Ted Slanker growing cattle on historically significant grass. He was situated almost on the banks of the Red River, the very same river that
movement. In France, discussions of art invariably turn toward the thorny subject of meaning, and Lascaux is no exception. Interpreters have long had a funny habit of asserting that nothing can be known about the beliefs and artistic intentions of an unknown people who spoke an unknown tongue more than ten thousand years before the beginning of history, and then they tell you precisely what the paintings mean. One of the first theories about Lascaux was that the paintings were an attempt at a
as humans had been doing for roughly ten millennia, Bakewell took the fattest bulls and put them with the fattest cows. Their fat, meaty offspring were bred—and inbred—with one another, until Bakewell one day found himself with truly fat, truly meaty cattle. His cows looked so different from all the others, in fact, that they seemed like a different animal altogether. What Bakewell had created was the first distinct cattle breed. His cows eventually got their own name, and are still known as
about laying it on a 300°C rock, and imagine the burst of fatty succulence coating the walls of my mouth. But I don’t eat it, and I never will, because my perfect Japanese steak is made out of plastic. CHAPTER SIX ARGENTINA I had, by this point, crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean three times, the Pacific Ocean once, and logged more than forty-five thousand miles, consuming somewhere on the order of fifty pounds of steak. Some of it was lean, and some was jubilantly fatty. Some of it was rare,