This Month

In every household are two or three small operations which a man is allowed to carry on all by himself. He may, for instance, have the right to scramble eggs lor company or to place the butter and the water pitcher on the table at the beginning of the meal. Such minor specialties, fraught with no great risk for the rest of the family, are often devised to give the man a sense of participation in the family’s affairs and the illusion of having a voice in its councils. A man of tested gullibility may find that he has earned several other responsibilities, such as hanging storm windows, pot scouring and general dishwashing, polishing silver and brass, shining shoes and cleansing the woodwork. A legend is built up that these are more in the nature of privileges than tasks, falling to him only because he does them so well. He is the family’s expert in dirty work and no one would dare, so it goes, to encroach on his domain.

A man with great force of character can sometimes assert his authority over a domestic matter of real importance like the cooking of roast beef or a steak. If he is obsessed, as most men are, by the belief that his talent for beef is unique, the rest of the family may simply have to give him his head; more likely, they will trade him out of some purely masculine prerogative like the liquor budget or what he should pay for shirts, in return for letting him make free with the beef. So it is that rib roasts and beefsteaks in many American households are cooked by the man. With so few other outlets of self-expression, the man naturally tends to overreach himself, and the results are calamitous.

The average man cooks a roast or steak according to a recipe developed from garbled memories of how his mother (or father) used to do it; what a stranger once told him in a New York — Chicago club car; a furtive reference to Fannie Farmer; and the dicta of a Wyoming guide. The recipe can call for almost anything, but it usually embraces three stages of the job: treatment before cooking, method of cooking, and the post-cooking or corrective stage.

TREATMENT BEFORE COOKING

This is usually some form of marinating for an inconveniently long period, perhaps three or four days, in olive oil, or vinegar, or oil and vinegar, champagne, beer, or whatever the man in the club car recommended. The whole catalogue of spices, onions, garlic, can become pari of the mixture.

METHOD OF COOKING

Roasts. — “Soar” the roast in a white-hot oven for an hour, or until the smoke penetrates the living room, whichever is earlier. Then turn the oven down to 600 degrees. This method preserves a raw area in the center where, as the man points out, all the juices of the meat have been preserved. If cooked further, the roast will shrink to about one eighth of its original bulk. In its result, the method is not unlike that of the South American Jivaros for shrinking the heads of their enemies to golf-ball size. There is no gravy problem, since all drippings go up in smoke. (See Post-Cooking Stage below.)

Steaks. — “Sear” the steak on both sides at white heat on the stove broiler or in the flames if a fireplace or an outdoor grille is used. Because it is impossible to reduce so hot a fire quickly, completion of the cooking is achieved at about the same temperature — the maximum. Keep a fire extinguisher handy. It takes only about fifteen minutes to give each side a thick, leathery quality (to preserve the juices) and to leave the greatly desired uncooked stratum in the center.

POST-COOKING STAGE

Having reduced the weight and volume of the beef by about 90 per cent, and also having dissipated any effect of the pre-cooking ritual, the man is now ready to put the final touch to his masterpiece, a “sauce" of his own invention. He makes it by mixing a great lump of butler with quantities of several proprietary condiments: equal parts of A-l, Worcestershire, Tabasco, chili and soy sauces, again the catalogue of spices, the whole topped off by a dose of sherry or Madeira.

It is small wonder that the steak-and-roast man is regarded by his womenfolk as pretty much of a loon. The question is not, Can he be saved? but, Is he worth saving? Whether he can win his way back to a more normal footing is hard to judge, but the low-temperature avenue of redemption is open to him.

THE LOW-TEMPERA PORE METHOD

Cook roasts and steaks rare, medium, or well done (although why people who don’t like rare meat spend money on beef is a mystery). Use a meal thermometer on the roasts and get to know its purport. Never “sear" a steak or good roast.

Rib or Rlolled Roasts. — Dredge the roast lightly wilh flour, put it in a shallow pan, oven temperature 275 degrees. Look at it an hour later: it looks just the way it did when you put it in. Two hours later: same impression. Eventually— and the meat thermometer will approximate it — the roast is done, uniformly done all the way through, loaded with juice, shrunk imperceptibly if at all, offering abundant gravy opportunities.

Steaks. — Broil slowly in low heat and turn the steak often.

If there is not enough ritual for him in lowtemperature cooking, the man can go back to hanging storm windows or shoe shining with all the ceremonial that he craves. C. W. M.