What Einstein Told His Cook (16 page)

W
E
HOMO SAPIENS
ARE
an omnivorous lot, with teeth and digestive systems well adapted to eating both plant and animal foods. But animal rights activists notwithstanding, it’s an undeniable fact that in our society, meat and fish are most often the center of the plate, the star players in our main dishes.

Of the virtually unlimited number of animal species on Earth, perhaps only a few hundred have been routinely hunted, trapped, or fished by humans for food, and only a small handful of those have been domesticated. In our contemporary Western society, we routinely consume even fewer. Walk through the meat department of a supermarket and you’ll rarely see more than four general kinds of meat: beef or veal, lamb, pork, and poultry.

On the other hand, some five hundred species of fish and shellfish are available in the United States, with more than twice as many available worldwide. The seas contain an unimaginable variety of edible species, yet we have only scratched the surface (the depths?) in domesticating them, that is, in “farming” them in commercially significant numbers.

Our relative dearth of choice, then, is not because of any lack of diversity in Nature, but because of self-imposed cultural and economic limitations. Many of us have sampled such other-cultural delicacies as grasshopper, rattlesnake, alligator, cockle, sea urchin, and sea cucumber, while many more of us have begun to enjoy rabbit, bison, venison, ostrich, and emu because of their growing commercial availability.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to classify our everyday animal foods into two categories: meat and fish. Or, as some restaurants put it for expense-account customers who can’t make up their minds which expensive dish to order, Surf and Turf—a combination of lobster tail and steak that goes together about as well as anchovies and ice cream.

In this chapter, we’ll see what makes animal protein from the land and from the sea look and cook differently.

ON THE LAND

RED, WHITE, AND BLEU

I like my steaks and roast beef rare. But often there’ll be someone at the table who makes a nasty crack about my eating “bloody” meat. What can I say in my defense?

N
othing. Just smile and continue to carve away, because they’re wrong. There is virtually no blood in red meat. Most of the blood that circulates through a cow’s veins and arteries never makes it to the butcher shop, much less to the dinner table.

Not to get too graphic about it, but down at the slaughterhouse, just after the critter is dispatched, most of the blood is drained out, except for what remains trapped in the heart and lungs which, you will agree, are of minimal gastronomic interest.

Blood is red because it contains hemoglobin, an iron-containing protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to the muscle tissues, where it is needed for movement. The color of red meat, however, doesn’t come primarily from hemoglobin. It is mainly due to another red, iron-containing, oxygen-carrying protein called myoglobin. Myoglobin’s job is to store oxygen right in the muscles, where it will be available for instant use whenever a muscle receives a call to action. If it weren’t for that on-the-spot myoglobin, the muscle would quickly run out of oxygen and have to wait for more blood to get there. Prolonged, strenuous activity would therefore be impossible.

When cooked, myoglobin turns brown, just as hemoglobin does. Well-done beef will therefore be grayish brown, while rare beef will still be red. But in France, when you want your steak to be very rare, ask that it be
bleu
. Yes, that means blue, but since when do the French have to be logical?

(Okay, to be fair, fresh, raw beef is actually the somewhat purplish color of myoglobin.)

Various animals contain various amounts of myoglobin in their muscle tissue, because they have varying degrees of need for a reservoir of strenuous-activity oxygen. Pork (those lazy pigs) contains less myoglobin than beef, which allows the pork pushers to advertise it as “the other white meat,” even though it’s really pink.

Fish contains even less. So animal flesh can be inherently red, pink, or white, depending on the evolutionary need for sustained muscular activity in different species. Tuna meat, for example, is fairly red, because tunas are strong, fast swimmers who migrate for vast distances across the world’s oceans.

Now you know why chickens’ breast meat is white, while their necks, legs, and thighs are darker. They exercise their necks by pecking and their legs by walking, but that huge breast is nothing but excess baggage. It has been bred into them because compared with the rest of the world, Americans have a stronger preference for white meat. In fact, unless they are given free range, today’s American-bred chickens are so pampered that even their “dark meat” is as white as their breasts.

HOW NOW, BROWN COWBURGER?

The ground beef in my supermarket is bright red on the outside and dull-looking on the inside. Are they spraying it with some sort of dye to make it look fresh?

N
o, they’re probably not playing games.

A freshly cut meat surface isn’t bright red; it’s naturally purplish because it contains the purplish-red muscle protein, myoglobin. But when myoglobin is exposed to oxygen in the air, it quickly turns into bright, cherry-red oxymyoglobin. That’s why only the outer surface of your ground beef is that nice, bright red color that we generally associate with freshness; the inner parts haven’t been exposed to enough air.

Freshly cut, purplish beef is shipped from the packing house to the markets in airtight containers. After being ground at the market, it is usually wrapped in a plastic film that permits the passage of oxygen, and the surface of the meat then “blooms” with the red color of oxymyoglobin. But on longer exposure to oxygen, the red oxymyoglobin gradually oxidizes to brownish metamyoglobin, which not only looks bad but gives the meat an “off”-flavor. It’s this metamyoglobin-brown color that signals over-the-hill meat. In reality, however, this transformation happens long before the meat becomes actually unwholesome.

Retail markets use plastic packaging materials (either low-density polyethylene or polyvinyl chloride) that allow just enough oxygen to penetrate to keep the surface of the meat at the bright red oxymyoglobin stage.

To sum it up: If your beef, whether cut or ground, is a dull purple, it’s really very fresh. But even if it has gone brown with metamyoglobin, it can still be good for several days. Your nose, not your eyes, is ultimately your best sense organ for determining whether your hamburger is
too
brown.

PRIME RIB, NO FIB

What does the “prime” really mean in “prime rib”? I thought it was the best and most expensive kind of beef, but in some restaurants the prime rib is really pretty bad.

U
SDA Prime is indeed the finest and most expensive grade of beef. But we have all at one time or another been subjected to a $5.95 (salad bar included) slab of tough, dry “prime rib” rimmed with vulcanized-rubber fat that clearly deserved to be stamped “USDA Inedible.” Is there some misrepresentation going on here?

Not necessarily. It’s true that in almost any context, the word
prime
implies first or top quality. But in this case it has nothing to do with quality: It refers only to the cut: where in the animal it came from. A prime rib roast can be of any USDA quality grade at all.

Before they are butchered, the USDA grades beef carcasses into eight quality categories, based on such characteristics as maturity, texture, color and fat distribution—characteristics that result in tenderness, juiciness and flavor on the plate. In descending order of desirability, they are Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner. (Select used to be called Good until 1987.)

When a carcass is butchered—regardless of its USDA grade—it is first divided into eight “primal” cuts: chuck, rib, short loin, sirloin, round, brisket and shank, short plate, and flank. The primal rib cut consists of rib numbers six to twelve of the steer’s thirteen ribs. After the tips of the ribs (the short ribs) are chopped off, what remains is what in butcherese shorthand is known as “prime rib.” Again, the name has nothing at all to do with the USDA Prime quality grade, so don’t be enticed by the words on the menu. Judge the roast’s probable quality by the quality of the restaurant.

DEM BONES

What do bones contribute to a stock? I can understand how meat and fat impart their flavors, but do the bones break down somehow? Or do we just put them in for the marrow?

D
em bones are an essential ingredient in making a soup, stock, or stew, every bit as essential as the meat, vegetables, and seasonings. Their purpose may not be obvious, however, if we think of them as hard, nonreactive mineral matter. Yes, their structural material is mineral: calcium phosphates, to be specific. But calcium phosphates don’t dissolve or decompose in hot water, so if that were all they were made of, we might as well add stones as bones. They wouldn’t contribute any flavor to a stock.

But bones also contain organic, as opposed to mineral, materials, most notably cartilage (gristle) and collagen. In young animals, the bones can actually contain more cartilage than mineral matter, and cartilage contains collagen, a protein that breaks down into soft gelatin when cooked. So bones actually contribute a rich and unctuous mouth feel to the stock.

Shin and thigh bones, together with their connecting knuckle joints, are particularly rich in collagen. If you really want a stock or stew that will jell almost like Jell-O when cooled, add a collagen-rich calf’s foot or a couple of pigs’ feet. Cooked pigs’ feet cooled in their jelly is an old-fashioned country treat. If you make it, tell your guests it’s a fancy French dish called
Pied de Cochon
.

The hard parts of bones appear to be solid, but they contain a surprising amount of water, nerve fibers, blood vessels, and other stuff that would make an instant vegetarian out of you if I told you. In Bones 101 you would learn that a typical bone is made up of three layers. The inner core is a spongy material containing lots of yummy organic matter and, in the hollows of the long bones, the even yummier marrow. That’s why—and this is important—we cut or crack open the bones before putting them in the stockpot. Outside the core is the hard, largely mineral layer followed by a tough, fibrous outer membrane called the periosteum.

But the bones we throw into the stockpot have hangers-on, too. Outside of a Halloween skeleton or an anatomy lab, have you ever seen a perfectly clean bone, without any meat, fat, gristle, or other connective tissue clinging to it? Not likely. All those bits contribute greatly to the stock’s flavor. Moreover, they brown beautifully when we roast our veal bones before committing them to the pot when making a brown stock.

So save all your bones in the freezer for stock-making day. Or take advantage of the last thing in the world besides advice that is free or nearly free: bones from your butcher.