Meaty Monday

 

Where's the beef? 

 

In Paris, vegetarian and vegan options are getting easier to find but for now, meat is king.  Especially beef. Most café-restaurants, bistros and brasseries will offer steak in some form on the menu, with all the usual suspects - côte de boeuf, entrecôte, bavette, faux-filet, rumsteak, filet mignon, onglet and plain old steak, or bifteck. [Warning: on French menus, unless filet mignon is followed by the word boeuf, it's always pork!] Langue de boeuf is beef tongue, and paleron and gîte, less tender cuts simmered for hours until chewable, show up in cold-weather stews such as Boeuf Bourguignon and Pot-Au-Feu, while meaty Côte de Boeuf (pour 2 personnes minimum), which is beef on the rib or the côte, is greatly prized as well as pricier because of its size, and might have to be reserved in advance and, due to its size, shared. Other beef dishes can include Tartare de Boeuf and Carpaccio de Boeuf. Nary a T-Bone in sight.

 

At the butcher's, the race bovine or cattle breed is proudly displayed, often with a photo of the animals, which does not help sales in countries where meat is presented in small portions and wrapped in plastic. Best-known breeds Charolais, Salers, Aubrac, Limousin, Rouge des prés, Gasconne, and, more recently, Angus. Where the beef comes from (origine France for example) is required to be posted, somewhere. 

 

A particular cut of steak is expected to appear on plates in a particular way, and that’s all part of it. So sauce béarnaise and frites maison are the usual accompaniments to côte de boeuf and sometimes, a marrow bone is thrown in. Seared entrecôte will arrive with a just melting pat of beurre maître d'hôtel. No bavette, a sort of flank steak, is worth its weight if not served with sauce à l'échalote, a wine-shallot sauce. And so it goes.

 

American tastes usually find that meat in France - and this includes lamb and duck - is underdone when it comes to their desired cuisson: saignant (rare), à point (medium/medium rare), bien cuit (well done). The most popular (French) choice for steaks is saignant and à point for cheeseburgers. The good news is, meat that's not cooked enough to one's liking can always be sent back to the kitchen to be cooked up. The bad: just ordering beef "well-done” (Anglo style) is usually a non-non and could elicit a comment here, a pffft there, or, as recently happened to a friend visiting from New York who ordered her steak well done, she turned around and caught the waiter making grimaces behind her back. - BPJ

Above: côte de boeuf (between saignant and à point) w/three sauces

Below: a côte de boeuf (saignant)