Eating beef pear - really!

One of the nice things about getting to know your butcher is that he'll sell you the "butcher's pieces" as they are known in France. These are little-known muscles that make great eating. The "pear" (la poire) is one of these muscles. It is a little round muscle, weighing in at a little more than a pound, with short fibers, and shaped like ... a pear! Right, that was tough.

It is very tender and makes great steak or fondue meat. As you can see, the butcher mangled it a bit, but that was on purpose as he removed all of the nerves from it. This makes me think that I should make a post about my butcher - soon.

I just grilled this puppy in a heavy pan, and put some salt and pepper on it when it was done, which is to say nice and rare. Delicious!

The absence of marbling might lead one to expect a dry piece of meat, and you'd be ill advised to overcook it on that account alone. However, if you keep it rare, it is a very delicate and tender piece of steak.

In pink, the part of the beef that "pear" comes from.

I'd be curious to know if it's even possible to get these cuts of meat in the US, where it doesn't seem that anyone goes through the trouble of identifying them, although perhaps it's what's called "round steak". I can remember that when my family first moved to the US in the late 1980s, and for years after that, the lack of correspondence between US and French meat cuts was a topic of conversation among French expats.