Yes, you can honor it by dressing it delicately, or you can summon all the condiments on offer and attack it with intensifiers: Soy! Wasabi! Spicy ginger! Maybe there’s an analogy in Japanese preparations of raw fish, another quiet food. When waiters prepare a tartare for you tableside, they can seem as though they’re just making it up with whatever bottle they have nearby: a big spoon of mustard, a splash of Tabasco, an egg yolk, a little olive oil (because why not?), capers, Worcestershire (which the French, unable to pronounce, always refer to as a “sauce anglaise”), even ketchup. What the French do is much more interestingly aggressive. Its appeal, instead, is in how the meat’s flavors linger in the mouth, akin to how a good wine is sometimes said to have “length.” The Italians, respecting the subtlety of those flavors, prepare their raw beef like a plate of crudo-with olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, a lot of salt, maybe an herb leaf. It presents few contrasts on the palate-no burnt and rare, nothing caramelized, no rendered fat, no crunch. Raw meat, like raw fish, is a quiet food. But in a dish made of raw meat? You want fresh. And, in New York at least, there seems to be an unofficial can-you-top-me competition among butchers to see who is prepared to age theirs the longest, as if to prove one’s commitment to taste over cash flow. You age meat for reasons of flavor development and tenderness. My favorite, I admit, was the tenderloin (which is almost banal in its obviousness), largely because it hadn’t been aged for more than ten days. Tallberg and I discussed, and experimented with, different cuts for a tartare. Tallberg prides himself on his local farm animals (like the seven- to eight-year-old dairy cows from Springdale Farm), and sells meat that is so flavorful and healthy and popular that his customers have to order it a week in advance. Our palates tell us everything, Cecchini told me recently, “from the animal’s birth to the moment of this raw slice, including if it had an honest death.” By way of example, I got lucky in my tartare experiments, which were conducted this last summer when I was in Maine with my family, owing to a savvy local butcher, Anders Tallberg, at Maine Street Meats, in Rockport. This, his smile conveyed, was the flavor of sunshine and green grass and nature. Raw, the meat revealed to him the animal’s diet, its exercise, and its health. I once did a stint in the Tuscan butcher shop of the celebrated and flamboyant carnivore Dario Cecchini, where the senior butcher-“il Maestro”-assessed his beef by slicing off a piece raw and chewing it slowly and reflectively. You want to be happy sticking your nose into it. And the smell should be appetizing, the healthy aromatics of a beneficently raised animal: grass-fed, if possible-a creature that has lived and roamed in the open air. The color is important (bright, intensely red), as is the firmness of the tissue. “Filet is good,” he told me, “but really anything goes if the meat is beautiful and fresh.” Top round, eye of round, heart, strip. Riad Nasr, of the restaurant Frenchette, who, during his time as a chef at Balthazar and Minetta Tavern, might well have sold more steak tartare than any other individual in the history of New York City meat eating, makes his from whatever is at hand. The cut? A lean one, but the cut is less important than the quality. Tartare is served “dressed” with any number of possible sauces, which are enlivening and essential, but the dish is obviously all about the meat: you want the best, most vibrantly delicious beef you can find. In fact, making a batch doesn’t require much more than a butcher you trust, a very sharp knife, clean hands, and freezingly cold bowls and plates. But the dish is not difficult to make-after all, it involves zero cooking. Most of us who enjoy steak tartare, preferably with a high pile of hot fries on the side, know it from eating it in a restaurant or a bistro and not from preparing it at home.
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