Patrick called on lawmakers to declare that a certain cut of beef, taken from the short loin behind the ribs, shall be known, by law, as the “Texas strip” steak. It is an outrage, he maintained, that the effete coastal snobs of Manhattan have put their brand on the delectable cut, which appears on menus across the nation as the “New York strip” — or worse, to haters of the Yankees baseball club, the “N.Y. strip.”
Readers of a certain age might be thinking that this would have been catnip to satirist Molly Ivins, whose cheerful disdain for Texas politics was evident when she wrote of one legislator: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” (...)
In fairness to the lieutenant governor, I do have a bone to pick over the etymology behind this popular bar steak — just not the same one. It’s not right that Texas should swipe the name of the New York strip because neither state is the rightful owner to begin with. Proper speakers of American English (which is, by presidential decree, the official language until we switch to Russian) should know that this much-loved beefsteak is in fact the “Kansas City strip.” Or, if you must, the “K.C. strip.”
How did a cut from the heartland come to be hijacked to Gotham and rudely rebranded? The story starts, interestingly enough, in Texas just after the Civil War. The Texas ranchers for whom Patrick wrings his hankie raised more cattle than they could eat. When the railroads entered the West, they figured they could walk the animals to Kansas or Missouri, connect with the rails, and ship the beef to Eastern cities by train.
But there was a catch: It was a long walk, and cows are not big hikers. The longhorn breed is an exception. They are good at hoofing it over long distances, at least compared with other cattle. Ranches across Texas filled up with longhorns.
But there was another catch: Longhorns walk so well because they are by nature sinewy and slender. And the steak-eating public of the Eastern cities had no appetite for tough, stringy beef. The answer to this problem was Kansas City, which became a way station between the ranchers and the diners. In sprawling stockyards on the Missouri River, the weary hikers from the Chisholm Trail gathered to feast on grasses and grains until they were nice and fat.
And then they got killed.
Butchers had a variety of ways to disassemble a steer. One popular approach involved sawing through a bone that, when sectioned, resembled the letter T, with beef of slightly different characteristics on each side of the upright. Though sometimes called a “porterhouse steak” for the beer-and-beef establishments where it was often served, this cut became widely known, for obvious reasons, as the “T-bone.” Another way of slicing things up, however, separated the marbled beef on one side of the bone into steaks known as “ribeyes” while rendering the leaner steaks on the other side into “strips.”
Simple justice demands giving credit where it’s due. The steaks aren’t “Texas strips,” because they arrived from Texas about as chewy as a cowboy’s boot. And they shouldn’t be “New York strips,” because New Yorkers contributed nothing to the process but their pieholes. They are “Kansas City strips,” in honor of the city where the beef got its flavor and the men in bloody aprons who popularized the cut.
Alas, America’s first upscale restaurant, complete with menus, was located on the island of Manhattan. Delmonico’s catered to the well-fed rich of the Gilded Age who, as everyone knows, plundered without pause. Among the things stolen in those rapacious years were the names of both the ribeye (dubbed the “Delmonico steak”) and the Kansas City (dubbed the “New York strip”).
by David Von Drahle, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post***
Egg prices have skyrocketed, recently surpassing $8 for a dozen wholesale large eggs. Stores are rationing cartons to customers and still getting cleared out. These phenomena are primarily driven by the spread of bird flu, which is forcing farmers to cull their flocks. That’s not Trump’s fault, though it doesn’t help that he accidentally fired bird flu experts at the Agriculture Department — setting off a scramble to rehire them — and deliberately suppressed research on the disease’s transmission. (...)Perhaps most eg(g)regiously, the Trump administration is encouraging Americans to cope with high prices by raising their own flocks.
“How do we solve for something like this?” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asked on Fox News. “People are sort of looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”
In no universe does it make economic sense for every American household — many of whom live in urban areas or even suburbs where it’s illegal to keep live poultry — to start farming their own food. The fact that we humans don’t have to spend all our time growing our own sustenance, and can instead specialize in other fields where we’re more productive, is a tremendous victory for our species. (...)
Encouraging millions of Americans who are completely inexperienced with animal husbandry to become amateur bird farmers in the middle of a bird flu epidemic also seems like a great way to expose more humans to bird flu.
This DIY egg production stratagem also raises questions about how the administration expects Americans to grapple with other grocery items that have grown more expensive. [ed. Cow in every garage?]
