Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 57 whom I admire if for no other reason than for the discipline it must take not to give in and have the big, pink ribeye of their dreams, steak is perhaps our nation's most significant food contribution to the world. And while a strong case could be made for the hamburger, I think we all know that the ham- burger is a great backyard barbecue staple, but when the occasion calls for serious beef consumption, the steak is the only way to go. How did it happen? We might as well ask how it didn't happen sooner—and the answer to that lies in a horrible can of stringy roast beef. Before refrigeration, the methods em- ployed to preserve meat were either curing or canning. And while pork can be cured in a variety of palate-pleasing ways, not to mention processed and canned into dubiously tasty products like Spam, similarly preserved beef failed to make much headway in 19th century America. Probably because canned beef was decidedly gross. Thus, beef remained a seasonal treat for much of the country, only available in the proximity of the herds of cattle themselves. Indeed, before the Civil War, most of the beef in the United States was raised, slaughtered, and eaten at most a couple of hundred miles away from where it was born. Then, to make a very complicated story much shorter than it deserves, a bunch of stuff happened that made it much eas- ier to get your hands on fresh beef. For one, the decimation of the bison on the continent's prairies had opened up a whole lot of grazing land, not to mention clearing the way for a transcontinental railroad. Then, technological advances such as refrigerated train cars meant that beef, alive or slaughtered, could be easily trans- ported anywhere in the country. A cow that had grown fat munching Montana grass might find its way onto a New York City steakhouse plate by way of a Chicago stockyard. And it was there, on the East Coast, that another recent in- vention would shape the ascent of steak: the restaurant. The restaurant was invented in Paris after the French Revolution. Before the 1830s, there were public dining houses, places where hungry folks could show up and pay to eat whatev- er meal the house had prepared. But the key innovation in a restaurant was being given a choice as to what to order. In 1834, diners at the newly opened Delmonico's in New York City were given a choice between such varied entrees as Stewed Liver for three cents, Pigs Head or Beef Steak for four cents, or the mysterious "Regular Dinner" for a compar- atively dear 12 cents—about $3.50 in today's money. Within a few years, Delmonico's was a sensation on a level we can hardly imagine today. People came from all over the world to sample the fare. Charles Dickens, for one, attended a dinner at Delmonico's so good that it changed his opinion of American food, prompting him to apologize for having once declared our fare vulgar and unimaginative. The Delmonico's steak proved so successful that sly en- trepreneurs, hoping to profit on the now internationally recognized name, opened restaurants delivering some- thing like the original for folks who couldn't make it to Man- hattan. Thus a "Delmonico's" with no connection to the orig- inal opened up in New Orleans, another in San Francisco, as well as Dodge City and Kansas City. Eventually there would be Delmonico's (or Delmonicos, Delmonico, or some varia- tion thereof) in Butte, Helena, Miles City, and probably more Montana towns. Interestingly, no one knows for sure what cut of beef the Delmonico's steak was, although some maintain it was a rib- eye while others think it was the chuck eye steak. One thing at least is beyond question: it was the highest quality cut of beef available at that time. But the average quality of beef in our day is significantly better than the cows first served at Delmonico's. Until the latter half of the 19th century, most of the cattle in the America were Spanish longhorns brought to the continent by the conquistadors. The introduction of English breeds, which were more muscular and better able to survive cold temperatures, led to cows that produced beef with more of the qualities we look for in a steak. And though there remains a healthy debate over the superiority of exclusively grass-fed or grain-finished beef, you can't argue that the burgeoning practice of feed- ing livestock grain didn't produce bigger, heavier cattle. We can't say for sure what a fully-dressed cow weighed in 1850, but in 1975 the average was 579 lbs, while in 2015 it was up to 817 lbs. By that logic, a cow in the 1840s probably weighed about the same as a large greyhound dog. That's a joke, of course, but the spirit of it is true: these were much smaller animals, with much less meat on them. Which serves to bring up another step in the evolution of the steak: the quality of the cut of meat is only as good as the sophistication of the butcher. Butchery, after all, has been around, well, forever. Quite a bit longer, according to the anthropological record, than cooking, since early man was content to, or at least resigned to, gnawing on raw meat for sustenance well be- fore they ever conceived of cooking it. Whether achieved by hands, sharp rocks, or teeth, butch- ery has, naturally, been a defining factor in how beef has been eaten. In the first half of the 19th century, every butch- er did their work by hand, wielding sharp knives and making curved cuts circumscribed within the arc of the human arm. But with the invention of the bandsaw and its widespread adoption among larger industrial butchers, the primal cuts are now made in long, straight lines. And if you still need further evidence that steak is applied science, consider that they're still finding new steaks today. The flat iron steak, now a trendy staple, was only "discov- ered" in 2002 by researchers from the Universities of Florida and Nebraska. Among the comparatively tough meat of the

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