In search of the perfect steak
Food memories capture a moment, just not a taste - so can I ever recreate the glory of my first steak au poivre? Plus: what I've been drinking recently
“IF there are some people here who prefer well-done… well, let’s have a chat.” Charmaine, our diminutive teacher, had the cooking class gathered around her as she went through the stages of the meal we were preparing under her tutelage at the Waitrose Cookery School earlier this month. The centrepiece: ribeye steak with green peppercorn sauce.
It’s one of several such courses I’ve taken recently and as at others, I picked up some useful tips. Decent cook though I am, I hadn’t known before now that it’s better to oil the steak than to heat fat in the pan. And I learnt how to judge the doneness of the meat by its feel under my finger. The result was certainly one of the best steaks I’ve cooked. But I know it can still be better.
For while I don’t eat a lot of red meat, my quest to cook the perfect steak is a long and ongoing one, rooted in my 70s childhood.
In 1970s Britain, steak was a luxury of unfathomable extravagance. Perhaps rich people ate it regularly: who could say? My family didn’t know anyone that wealthy, pinched academic middle-class that we were. It was more luxurious than even, ooh, smoked salmon.
France was somehow different. Philosopher Roland Barthes famously parsed the cultural significance of steak and chips to his nation in his book Mythologies back in 1957. But in 1970s Devon, you didn’t need to understand Barthian signifiers to know the key point: steak cost the earth. When in the early 1980s a fussy French exchange student demanded steak, my mother’s fiery outrage could have char-grilled a sirloin, had she given way.
So it is no surprise that around the same time, it was in France that I ate my first ever steak. I was 17. My appetites during that visit telescope the years: to this day, it remains the best steak, the memory to which I compare every one I have cooked or eaten since.
I was staying on a farm in a small village near Fontainbleau, just south of Paris. My father had first come to stay here aged 16, in 1953, through a friend of his school French teacher. It changed his life: this working-class Gloucestershire boy found his direction in life - to study foreign languages (I wrote about this here.) But by 1982, things at the farm had changed a lot.
When my father first arrived, there were no tractors in this village: horses still powered everything. By the 1980s, mechanised farming meant no horses and no farmhands or other family around. I had visited once before with my family, aged nine. Even compared to then, it seemed a lot quieter. And farmer Georges was now in his late fifties, a man of few words contemplating retirement.
I was there about ten days. It was good for my French. We cooked a memorable Easter lunch for the whole extended family: I spent an hour with Georges’s elderly mother stuffing prunes with foie gras paté. I had a couple of evenings out with the family’s early-20s son, hanging around in cafés with his cool-seeming, cigarette-smoking friends. But most of the time, my stay was pretty dull.
I think my hosts sensed this. So they sent me for the day to work on the farm of younger friends in a nearby village. They were fortyish: he a thickset man, she pretty, strict with their two primary-age children. I went to work with him in the fields picking up rocks. It wasn’t exactly stimulating and he wasn’t a great conversationalist – but I was glad of the change.
And then lunch back at the farmhouse. I doubt they regularly had a working lunch of steak – though it didn’t seem any great occasion for them. For me, it was a revelation. The steaks were not thick – probably bavette – and were cooked au poivre in the traditional way, with a little cream and a lot of butter in the sauce. I was transfixed. The ordinariness of the surroundings – farmhouse kitchen, children back from school – stopped me from being overawed (“Steak??”). But I gloried in the peppery, creamy, meaty plate in front of me.
Just five years later – as I would have been amazed to know that day in muddy French fields – I had embarked on a History PhD in North Carolina, in a land where steak is an entirely unremarkable dish. Such was its allure still that in the summer of my first year, when house-sitting for my doctoral advisor, I couldn’t resist a steak from his freezer. The low-grade supermarket meat – there’s a reason it’s so affordable there – was tough and tasteless: only nominally in the same universe as my French epiphany.
It did at least spur me to try to cook steak better over the years that followed. Have my efforts ever measured up? Not quite.
During the Covid-19 lockdowns, we regularly bought high-end steak as a treat. Not only am I more affluent than my parents ever were; it seemed justifiable at the time when we couldn’t spend our money going out. Now aided by a carnivorous son the same age that I’d been in France, we did cook some very fine steaks that Spring and Autumn of 2020.
Yet somehow they never quite recaptured the flavour of that farmhouse lunch – because that was the taste of a moment as well as of the meat on my plate. My appetite had been powered by the excitement of discovery: a young man hungry in every sense. Even a much better steak in south London may never quite compare. But with my new tips from Charmaine, I’ll keep trying.
What I’ve been drinking recently
Can Sumoi Garnatxa Blanca 2022, Penedès - this Catalan bodega is a project of Pepe Raventós and Francesc Escala, both of top cava producer Raventós i Blanc. A soft nose and warm, peachy fruit but well balanced - lovely. I had a glass of this in the excellent wine bar at Morchella Dining Room - a nice, mostly natural list plus tempting snacks that I somehow managed to resist before dinner elsewhere (Shelved Wine, £21.29.)
Oenops “Apla” white 2022 - this Greek white from near Drama, in Thrace to the east of Thessaloniki, is a non-traditional blend of Malagousia, Assyrtiko and Vidiano. The latter two grapes are, respectively, from Santorini and Crete and ten years ago a blend like this would have been unthinkable in Greece. But it works pretty well - fresh, crisp and clean. I drank at the ever-brilliant Chez Bruce in Wandsworth to celebrate my birthday last month (Three Wines, £16.79. Shelved Wine have the 2023 at £16.10.)
Domaine des Trinités “Le Pech Mégé” 2019, AOP Languedoc-Pézenas - a Grenache- heavy blend, the balance Syrah and Carignan, this southern French red has an animal edge to it. Dark and concentrated but with a kind of wild, mineral freshness and acidity too: really quite individual at the price (2019 now N/A UK; Lea & Sandeman have the 2020 and Cambridge Wine Merchants the 2021, from £14.99.)
I’m continually trying to cook the “perfect” steak. I have found that a meat thermometer has helped enormously, as has learning to rest the meat (at the finished internal temp) for the same length of time as cooking.