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.

Pink slime, it's what's for dinner!

According to recent news stories (here and here), the USDA has approved the use of so-called "lean textured fine beef" or "boneless lean beef trimmings", aka "pink slime", in school meals.


Pink slime is basically recovered beef meat that has been treated with ammonia gas. In this case, "recovered" refers to the fact that this meat used to be deemed unsuitable for human consumption, in part because slaughter conditions made unhealthy by exposing it to cow feces. It is "recovered" in the sense that it's no longer used as dog food. In other words, it's recovered because it now generates a higher revenue than it used to.

If you live in the USA, pink slime can be part of your hamburger today, and you'll never know it because it doesn't have to be labeled - after all, it's just meat.

If this seems strange to you, it's because it is.

Pink slime might well epitomize the problem of industrial meat production. We have animals that are slaughtered in factories, their carcases treated with toxic chemicals, and the resulting "meat" sold to unwitting consumers. At the same time, the USDA refuses to mandate clear labeling thereby preventing consumers from making informed purchasing decisions.

Digression: why oppose labeling? those with nothing to hide will not fear labeling requirements, unless it's the cost of the label that's the problem??


To argue, as the president of the American Meat Institute, that pink slime reduces waste and is therefore a "sustainable" product is to insult the intelligence of one's audience. There is nothing sustainable about the mode of production that produces pink slime. Industrial meat production is, by its very nature, unsustainable, as argued elsewhere on this blog. While I do not doubt that producing and selling pink slime is financially profitable, its production cannot transform an unsustainable industry into a sustainable one. To invoke sustainability is disingenuous, if not outright mendacious.

Personally, I sidestep this entire problem by not eating much hamburger to start with. If I do, I buy it straight from my butcher and watch him grind it for me using his refrigerated grinder - I know exactly what cut of beef he's using to make my hamburger.

If you don't have access to a butcher, or if your butcher won't grind your beef to order, you have three choices if you want to be sure to avoid pink slime:

• grind your own hamburger
• eliminate hamburger from your diet
• shop only at supermarkets that guarantee that their ground beef is "pink slime"-free. There is a list of supermarkets in the ABC story linked above.

If your supermarket isn't on ABC's list, you could ask what their policy is on pink slime. I know I would.

The Human Cost of Animal Suffering

In a column in the New York Times, Mark Bittman discusses some implications of industrialized meat production.

He makes some interesting points, most notably that the disconnect between animal slaughter and the vast majority of meat consumers has insulated those consumers from the realities of meat production, and allowed them to abdicate their responsibilities as meat eaters.

These responsibilities, as I discussed in previous posts, include sticking to the inter-species "contract" established between livestock and humans:

• Humans provide comfort, food, veterinary care, evolutionary advantages, and a humane death to their livestock.
• In return, the livestock provide their meat, skin, milk, etc...

Clearly, this compact is not made at the individual level, but it hard to argue that as species, cows, pigs, ducks, etc... have not benefited from their symbiotic relationship with humans.

The industrialization of meat production violates all of the humans' obligations under the "contract". Animals are raised in uncomfortable conditions, given unhealthy foods, pumped with hormones and antibiotics, culled instead of cured, and slaughtered in abhorrent conditions.  As consumers, we are responsible for the way in which the products we buy are produced: with our dollars/euros/yens, we agree to participate (or not) as the final rung in the production chain. This means that by consuming industrial meat, each one of us is endorsing the violation of the inter-species contract described above.

I'd like to think that most meat consumers are willfully or unwillingly ignorant of the manner in which their meat is produced, and that is why the industry is able to operate as it does. At the same time, it is fairly clear that the industry has taken great pains to hide its practices, sensing, perhaps rightly, that knowledge might bring on scrutiny and reduced meat consumption.

Petit salé aux lentilles - salt pork with lentils

It's still winter, and so it's still slow-cooking season. This week my daughter and I tried a very easy dish: salt pork with lentils (petit salé aux lentilles). This is a traditional French dish that is often served in cafeterias and such because it doesn't have many ingredients and can cook without much supervision.

The trick is to find a good piece of salt pork, and possibly a nice thick sausage to go with it. You can use any piece of salt pork, depending on your budget or appetite. This time around, I used a piece of pork shoulder, from the top of the shoulder (palette). This is the "blade" or "blade shoulder" in the US and UK systems. If you want to make a true-to-tradition petit salé, you can also add a Morteau sausage.

As always, you start by assembling the ingredients. In this case, I went for a slightly fancy stock, with an eye to making soup with it afterwards. My broth had carrots, onions, black radish, leaks (white and green parts), kohlrabi (chou-rave) with its leaves, pork belly, herbs (parsley, rosemary, thyme), cloves, garlic, and peppercorns. You get to eat all of the vegetables in the end, so it's not a loss... You can stick to carrots and onions if you'd like.

Next step, put the well-rinsed piece of salt-pork in a pan of cold water and bring to the boil. When the water boils, take the meat out and empty the water. Be sure to trim any excess fat off, as it won't be grilling away but rather going into the broth.

 

While the water is boiling, prep the vegetables for the broth, enlist your 4 year old if necessary

Tie all of the herbs into a bundle so that you can fish them out at the end. Note that this doesn't work as well as advertised, and I think I am going to buy one of these soon (or this). This is a good time to teach your child how to tie a knot, without the pressure of rushing off to school in the morning and without being bent over to tie a shoelace.

 

The broth ingredients, together with the clove-studed onion.

Put everything back into the pan once the salty water's been thrown out (great task for a small child).

Pour water over the whole thing, cover, and boil slowly for 2 hours or so. Don't worry if the pot is very full: the veggies will shrink over time. You should not add any salt, as the meat will provide all that you need.

 

Even though this is a stand-alone meal, you can prepare some side dishes in the meantime. We glazed some yellow turnips and and onions. My daughter has become quite the expert peeler over the last month, and so I delegated the turnips to her while I took care of the onions. As it happens, onions will sting your eyes more if you're shorter, as your eyes will be closer to the chopping board. This is therefore not a good task for a 4 year old.

Once again, this is not a dish that looks all that good at the end (so no photo), but it sure is delicious!

Cooking... with children

If you're the not the artsy type or don't have ready access to the outdoors, it can sometimes be hard to find activities to enjoy with your children. Unless, of course, if you like to cook.

I grew up in a family where food was important, and my father loved (still does) going to the market and cooking very nice meals for all of us to enjoy. Unfortunately, I don't have any recollection of his ever teaching me how to hold a knife or how to make blanquette- though my grandmother taught me how to make vinaigrette, with tarragon. Most things I learned by observation and by trial and error. Perhaps I never asked to be taught or shown.

My daughter, by contrast, has been wanting to participate in food preparation for a few months at least. She's still young (4.5 years old) and not particularly well-coordinated, but as she's been growing older, her attention span and dexterity have both improved. Today, I try to encourage her to help me whenever she asks to, even if it means that it'll take me longer to fix lunch - or dinner.

I like to think that she'll assimilate the basic techniques that I try to teach her (really just a bag of tricks I've accumulated over the years), but I am more interested in her learning about where food comes from, how it's made, and what it takes to make it taste good, so that she'll grow up to have a choice to make her own food instead of relying on precooked meals.

In the hope that it will help other parents find a system that works for them, I'll make a quick list of rules and tricks that have worked for us:

• Dad is in charge: his word is final and not up for discussion
• Cooking is dangerous: there are lots of sharp and hot things - Dad knows what's safe and he'll tell you
• Daughter must ask before doing anything, particularly anything involving a knife of something hot, unless previously and explicitly authorized
• Messes are great: if your daughter wants to stick her hand inside a raw squid, let her
• Messes are cleaned up: little hands can also wield a sponge
• Anything not dangerous can be tasted or touched, warm or cold, including warm butter or cold pig fat (small amounts), for example, but not raw chicken, obviously...
• Peelers can be safe knives for 4 year olds, but little hands can have trouble handling them, so don't focus on technique: let the child peel the potato/turnip/kiwi however she wants and praise the results, if warranted.
• Giving a 4 year old a real, big-person, cooking knife is a mark of trust that will be appreciated (don't let it out of your sight and keep your hands close by), but daughter must ask before picking it up.
• Measuring a great activity for a child, and a good way to play with numbers
• Daughter needs a step stool or similar prop to be high enough to work at the counter
• Little eyes will be more affected by onions because they are closer to the chopping board
• Trusting a child will be rewarded by an improvement in behavior (I suspect that this works in other areas of life as well) and in the attention paid to the activity.
• Be prepared to repeat yourself, it's not because a child is cooking with you that she's not a child

Another thing that's really neat about cooking with a child is that they will get to ask all sorts of questions about the things we're preparing: "where are the fish's teeth?", "what's this black thing?" (a seed), "why is this turnip white and purple and that one yellow?", "will my tongue turn green if I eat this?" (let's try), etc... It's a great opportunity to answer questions, even if that means postponing an answer to look things up on the Internet.


We have a great time cooking together, and while a 4 year old can be silly and sometimes frustrating to cook with, it's a good way for me to spend some quality time with my daughter, especially as her younger brother (1 year old) cannot participate yet. She also likes to come to the market with me, and I sometimes let talk me into buying things that I normally wouldn't, as I try to encourage her curiosity.

Last but not least, cooking together makes it much more likely that my daughter will try, like, and eat the things that we prepare together - and that's never a bad thing.