Hello. I am here to serve you steak. Not just one steak, but lots of steaks, cooked and presented in lots of different ways.
I’m also happy to report these steaks are hot. The 1990s has witnessed the reappreciation of the pleasure of eating a food that everyone can understand and that just tastes good. Once again, the steak dinner is the feast of choice for special occasions and a symbol of American well-being and prosperity. Once again, people speak with real enthusiasm about the excitement of confronting a “big, juicy, succulent” steak. We say we “crave” a steak, and we mean it. For me, there is the pleasure and the extra seductive element of pleasure delayed.
Steak, I confess, did not play a large part in my childhood. My mother was a good cook, celebrated within our family for her terrific desserts. But her approach to steak was to buy one that was no more than half an inch thick and cook it until she was sure it was brown all the way through. As a result, steak was not much in demand Chez Rice.
It wasn’t until my first year in college that I tasted a steak that was crisp, almost crunchy, on the surface and thick enough to be gloriously pink in the center. And juicy. Ah, how I loved that juice! For that matter, how I loved the outsized, richly dressed salad that came before the steak, the equally outsized baked potato on the plate with the steak—indeed the entire experience of dining at a restaurant aptly named “The Steak House.”
Gifted with an uncommonly good appetite, the thinness of my wallet was the only impediment as I pursued steaks of record sizes over the next few years. I also ate steak raw, marinated, and chicken-fried. Gradually I discovered a wider horizon that included garlic-anointed sirloins swimming in fragrant pizzaiola sauce beside a big portion ot pasta. They ranked right up there with the thin, chewy but incredibly flavorful steak served at second-rank French restaurants. A gob of heavenly butter on top, distributed bits of chopped shallot and parsley over the steak as it melted.
About this time, happily, my chauvinist notion that Americans had the monopoly on preparing great steak was erased. It took only a single visit to the tappen yaki room of a Japanese restaurant. The lightning-fast cutting and cooking on the flattop grill around which we were seated was wonderfully theatrical. The steak was supremely tender. But what impressed me most was the impact of soy sauce and less familiar seasonings on the meat, and the crunch of the barely cooked vegetables served with it.
Eating steaks in restaurants was fun, and, it turned out, a wonderful preparation for what came next—cooking them. As a novice, bachelor cook in the pre-pasta 1960s, when fancy carry-out food came from a deli and was a pastrami sandwich, it was inevitable I’d become familiar with steak. There weren’t many options and it was what everyone wanted to eat.
I progressed from burgers to bavette, the superior version of flank steak sold at Washington’s French Market. A pair of fellow journalists, with whom I shared quarters, were willing collaborators in demolishing my experiments. My Japanese dining experience opened a whole new world, and the delight I’ve taken since in using Asian techniques and flavorings to cook steak is reflected in recipes such as Asian Beef Salad with Cucumbers and Thai Red Beef Curry.
As I cooked on, there were opportunities to make side dishes and experiment with sauces. I’d doctor a barbecue sauce until it became my own. Copying the French chefs, I’d turn a simple pat of butter into a repository for garlic and herbs and more. Making beurre composé, as the French call it, is an invitation to almost limitless innovation.
Composed butters are, I learned eventually, but child’s play. With the encouragement of Craig Claiborne, as I neared age thirty, I resigned from the Washington Post, took my meager savings, and enrolled in Paris’s famed Le Cordon Bleu.
Talk about the steak-and-potatoes American diet! The French seemed to order steak and potatoes even more often than we did, but they make both in so many different ways that the combination never becomes monotonous. At the school, I learned the difference between filet and entrecôte, garnishes for such classics as filet à la forestière (with morel mushrooms), entrecôte bordelaise (with poached bone marrow), and a remarkable array of sauces. The opportunity to travel led me to Florence, where I devoured the famous T-bone called fiorentina. I found fascinating steak preparations, too, in such disparate environments as Scandinavia and Spain.
Back home and back in journalism, working at the Washington Post, then Food & Wine magazine, and most recently the Chicago Tribune, I’ve had occasion to discover the diversity of great steak in the great steak houses, from such down-home classics as the Ranchman’s Cafe in tiny Ponder, Texas, Jess & Jim’s in Kansas City and Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi, to upscale Peter Luger and Sparks in New York City, Bern’s in Tampa, and the unparalleled array in Chicago.
My main objective in this book is to share practical information about buying, cooking, and serving steak at home. Using my book in your kitchen, you can include steak in your weekly diet with recipes using what I think of as “downtown cuts” that are relatively low in cost and easy to prepare. Other recipes, calling for more expensive “uptown cuts,” are perfect for entertaining and special occasions.
The book is organized by cuts of steak because it’s not enough simply to ask a butcher for steak for dinner. Inevitably, you must decide which steak you want. You must say “sirloin” or “flank.” Knowledge of these cuts and how best to cook each of them also is vital to preparing a steak properly and enjoying it fully. There’s a reason a chuck steak costs less than a T-bone. It is less tender and cooking it will require more attention and time. But the reward is in the taste and flavor.
Much of what is offered to you in this personal celebration of dining on steak will be new. The best and brightest of our restaurant chefs have been expanding the use of steak on their menus and introducing some very inventive dishes. In New York City, Larry Forgione of An American Place makes a rich beer sauce for chuck steaks. In Chicago, David Schy of the Hubbard Street Grill plays magician and turns eighteen ingredients into one dynamite sauce for skirt steak. At San Francisco’s popular Lulu, Reed Hearon garnishes a succulent bone-in rib steak with artichokes, potatoes, and black olive butter. I’ve adapted these recipes—and more from other chefs I know—for the home kitchen, revised old favorites to take into account the way we eat today, and developed others to take advantage of the extraordinary range of ingredients available in our markets.
There’s more: appetizers to serve before your steak, side dishes to serve with it, dreamy and unabashedly rich desserts for after; there are also drink recipes, and my thoughts on wine to serve with various steak preparations. Those of you who love the outdoor grill will find elements of an entire meal—vegetables, steak of course, and even a dessert pizza. In addition, there’s a listing of some of my favorite steak houses and mail-order sources for steaks that are restaurant-quality or from specialty-beef cattle.
Tender American steak from corn-fed cattle is one of the taste treats of the modern world. The French, Greeks, and Asians agree. Most often this opinion is formed during a meal in a restaurant. But stick with me and you’ll learn the ways to prepare great steak at home.
—William Rice
Chicago, February 1997
