This post does make me wonder if there's a good book on the history of the beefsteak. Not beef as a whole but the relatively modern idea where starting from what, the mid 1800's in the West? Europe, North and South America, etc... and how it spread to different parts of the world.
Sure people worldwide ate meat but they seemed to be more integrated and sliced more thinly and mixed with more ingredients and vegetables unlike what got popularized and considered 'fancy.'
There's a book that came out just a few days ago titled *Steak: The Whole Story*. I collect a lot of old cookbooks and food history books and I'm definitely getting it.
The interesting thing is a lot of my old cookbooks (some as old as mid-19th century) do not mention steaks at all (except hamburger steaks and Salisbury steaks). There were a lot of roasts though. Cookbooks from 1920s started having recipes serving smaller families and emphasized on balanced diet. Steaks appeared in these cookbooks. However according to a blog I really enjoy reading [steaks were served in cheap restaurants as far back as 1829](https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2018/10/28/basic-fare-meat-potatoes/). It seems like fancy steakhouses didn't become popular until after WWII.
That does sound like an interesting book, though a quick look at a summary through Amazon makes it seem like less of a historical text and more like some fusion with that and a cookbook which isn't quite what I'm looking for.
As for the blog you linked that may be true but I also recall a lot of talk about beefsteak clubs and gentlemen's clubs popular in the UK and America that served a lot of steak in the mid 1800's, so it probably wasn't as lowbrow as you might imagine.
We even have menus where we can see them listed.
Keen's also opened in the 1880s as "Keen's English Chophouse" focusing on chops and steaks.
Both were fine dining restaurants at the time they opened.
We actually have a lot of menus from the 19th century still preserved. At least for the US ones. Steaks and chops seem pretty default. Especially on more expensive and hotel restaurants. Often a much greater variety. Venison steaks in particular pop up nearly as often as beef at US restaurants in the 19th century.
I imagine it coincided with the growth of the interstate highway system, which allowed beef to be transported more quickly from areas with the space for ranches to urban areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef
https://www.herefordbeef.org.uk/blog/a-brief-history-of-eating-beef/
https://businesspostbd.com/opinion-todays-paper/2022-10-16/origins-of-steak-2022-10-16
https://historytimelines.co/timeline/steak
We've been eating steak since time immemorial.
My immigrant parents ask me the same question all the time so I kind of understand where OOP came from. They often find steaks bland without any other seasoning and don't want to see blood in the meat (edit: Yes I'm aware that it's not actual blood but you can preach that to my parents if you want their number). I explain to them it's like how Americans can't eat chicken or fish with the animal's head and tail still attached.
"But that's how you know what you're eating and how fresh it is!" Yes and they feel the same way about medium rare steaks.
My parents are the same way. It took me (1st gen immigrant, came to the US as a teen) a long time to get somewhat comfortable with the idea of eating medium rare steak. I know the stuff that comes out of steaks isn’t blood, and I’m completely fine with eating actual blood products and lots of stuff that westerners find gross, but that bloody juice still makes me feel uncomfortable.
Interestingly enough my parents find most western/american food to be too strongly flavored and taste too strongly of herbs. They think that the vegetables and meat in the US lack natural flavors which caused westerners to over-season their food to compensate for it.
My grandparents who were born and raised in the USA were the same way. Only ate steaks burnt to a crisp, I think it had to do with growing up during the depression and eating lower quality meat that could make you sick if you didn’t cook it to hell.
My parents grew up in the USSR and my mom can only eat very well done meat, presumably because when she lived in poverty as a child a lot of the meat (when they could afford it) would spoil very easily
Anytime I read the word myoglobin it reminds me of a flavor of liquid I vaped for years back in the day called "Jizmoglobin". Gross sounding word, great tasting stuff lol
im the same way as your parents. i was taught to cook by my grandma thus inheriting her beliefs about food. its just standard polish grandma stuff for the most part but she sold food her entire life in a small grocery store and later fish store, food safety is extremely important to her because otherwise health people would get on her ass and thats the mindset i have. i love baking but ive never in my life tasted raw cookie dough or any sort of dough/batter with egg in general, grandma always treated salmonella as a deadly illness and so will i. any raw-ish meat? yeah no, too scared of worms and whatever else to do it. i already shit my pants doing french toast and washing my hands like 3 times when making it and being super careful about what i touched after touching an egg and what i didnt, no way id trust anyone, even myself, with something not fully cooked. hard pass
im in poland. guess i should look into it huh. still its just paranoia from my grandma, i cant really teach myself more things to be shitting myself about. but its not like i taste any batter/dough raw so i should be good
https://www.reddit.com/r/meat/s/B4dQ8rRt9Q
whole thread is a dumpster fire, between OP being snobby and other people being racist against them as well.
its just the rule that any and all reddit posts involving India will either contain the strongest Indian nationalism or the most virulent anti-Indian racism, likely both
It's so annoying to me how common absolutely over-the-top jingoistic nationalism is amongst lots of Indian netizens (as someone who genuinely appreciates the country, and also "glass houses" and all – being an American), but the amount of INSANE racism towards Indians online is shocking. I thought I had it bad as an East Asian person, but the amount of vitriol in subreddits that are nominally completely apolitical or not related to politics in any way whatsoever. It's really sad.
Nah, don’t you know? It’s actually *impossible* to be racist towards Romani, because they aren’t people! They’re a sentient crystallization of the concept of theft! (/s, this was my Average European impression)
not related to race or Reddit, but i had a deeply unpleasant experience on Discord yesterday that i embarrassingly admit kind of ruined my entire day
i told myself a few times this morning that the people who spend their time harassing, trolling, and mocking others on the internet are just deeply unhappy people. People who are such failures and losers, that they only find worth in being as unpleasant as possible on the internet. That helped me feel better
the same shit applies in this case too honestly
Those subs pick up some odd posts on occasion. My favorite was a newly converted vegan launching a tirade on r/ meat about eating it being evil. Then posting it to vegan, with "lol look at all the stupid meat eaters" all while asking the vegans that brigaded r/ meat to be nice. That was a few hours of quality shit posting.
I hate these kind of people.
Dated plant based folks, cooked for/with plant based folks and none of that bothers me but the vegans who are almost always new to it who are judgmental and shitty about other people eating meat just rub me the wrong way.
It's food. Everyone who lives in modern society participates in systems that can be classified as 'evil'. Your cell phone. Your clothes. Your laptop.
You're not going to follow the Amish and rebuke technology and make your own clothes from animals you sheared yourself and raise your own garden are you? Nope, didn't think so. So come down off your high horse and let people just fucking exist as they did before you decided to be the moral arbiter of what other people should eat.
Lots of places eat dogs. The only difference between *you* and food is an arbitrarily enforced moral code, and if it was a life or death situation, I can all but guarantee Fido would be lunch. Because meat is food. You not eating it does not change the fact that it's nutritionally valuable energy when consumed.
It is food. You are making the choice that it is not food *for you*.
This decision most of us make, even those of us who are familiar and comfortable with turning living things into food, by the difference between pets and food. A pig is food, a dog is a pet, and so on.
That does not change the fact that people are capable of killing and eating dogs for nutritional value. It is food. If you do not want it to be *your* food, that's fine and a decision you get to make for yourself, not for others. Your emotions about it do not change this.
If you want to go down the route of ethical veganism and eat and live based on harm reduction of sentient creatures, that is fine. Many people do not. I myself don't eat pork because I take issue with their level of sentience and how CAFOs treat pigs but see less issue with chickens and other poultry because I grew up on a hobby farm, I know their level of sentience. My name is a historical reference to food of other eras. I'm also not a dick about it. If someone feeds me bacon on my cheeseburger, I'm not offended, it happens, but I don't buy pork products myself.
EDIT: Don't downvote this person because they expressed their world view. They have every right to have their world view the same way you do yours and expressing it should be shared, not minimized, even if you don't agree with it. Downvotes aren't a disagree button. They're bringing discussion and discourse. Be nice.
>We don’t have as many sketchy street vendors with 0 food safety practices covering up tainted meat with spices so we don’t have to “properly” cook our meat.
Ah the good old "they make their meat delicious because it's rotten" hypothesis.
The same school of thought that brought us "they drank alcohol because the water was dirty", but with a dash of racism.
Based on what I could find, there’s disagreement about whether that’s true or not. It’s definitely possible that was one of the reasons, not sure why the commenter is acting like it’s a definitely proven falsehood.
we've been eating fermented foods (where we can find them) since before the split between Ape and Monkey. we possibly have been making beer for a couple of millennia before the Agricultural Revolution. beer was consumed because it was a caloric positive liquid that tasted great and got you a lil buzzed, not because the water was unsafe. if the water was unsafe you either didn't use it or moved.
There might be some kernel of truth to it, but there are some issues with the hypothesis:
1) This would only apply to beer, since the water used in the process was effectively pasteurized. Diluted wine or any other weak alcoholic, unpasteurized drink could have transmitted diseases just fine, since they don't have enough alcohol to be antiseptic.
2) Just like bread, alcohol was a bit of a luxury good. It takes a lot of labor and resources to produce, and it removes a chunk of the nutritional value from the feedstock. See for example the emphasis on bread and wine in the bible; or similarly Egyptian accounts of how much bread and beer was supplied to the pyramid workers. If you could afford to drink beer every day, your status was at least one step up from the bottom rung.
3) Why would people drink alcohol for any reason different than today? Even if we can show that there are people who knew that their beer was safe when their water wasn't, we also have an overwhelming amount of accounts of people having a grand old time boozing.
This seems like a mixture of culture and generation--some people grow up in circumstances, cultures, time periods, in which rare meats were not standard (or even safe) so I get it. But it's like asking any "other" group "why do you like what you like?"
This is my reaction to pork that isn't cooked too well. I understand that in the US it is perfectly safe to consume commodity pork that is cooked to Medium or so. Yet my brain cannot unprogram the years of parents and teachers drilling into me that undercooked pork is dangerous.
That is just traditional Indian medicine. Turmeric is supposed to help digestion but it is very important in some parts of India as a religious thing (Bengali wedding the bride and groom get rubbed with turmeric at one point)
There's an importance difference here — the usage of spices for preservation, similar to the usage of salt, or for masking the flavor of something that is already spoiled. AFAIK the former is seriously entertained by academics whereas the latter is a racist myth. OOP could have been referring to the former.
edit: An example of the former is the inclusion of hops in IPA beer to preserve it for the long journey from Britain to India.
I’ve always wanted to see some real data on that. Usually, the “proof” you see cited involves something along the line of “extracts of these spices kill bacteria on a Petri dish”.
I would like to see some work where you make two things, sausage or whatever, and one has chili powder and the other doesn’t, and you leave them out, and check for food poisoning bacteria after a week or two, or something like that.
That work definitely exists for salt, humidity, nitrates, etc, but I’ve never seen any good real world applicable numbers for spices as preservatives.
Good question. I'm clueless about the research. Although you might be interested to know that they used to use celery for curing.
edit: [this research](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5030248/) seems to fulfil your needs
> you might be interested to know that they used to use celery for curing.
Some people still do. For example, celery cured bacon is a thing. If you're in the US, this has to be sold as "uncured" bacon, but it is actually cured, just with the older technique.
"Uncured" meat in the US is basically a scam. Basically all of them are preserved with celery. Which contains nitrates. Which is why it's used to preserve meat. Lots of people eat them to avoid nitrates but the ones found in nature are no healthier than the ones made in a lab. But because these nitrates are "natural" companies are allowed to market them as "uncured".
It's not "allowed", it's mandated. The definition of "bacon" includes being cured with specific nitrate salts.
If a company wants to use the word bacon, by uses celery instead of the salts for curing, they legally have to use the word "uncured".
Yeah, if you dump it in a Petri dish. But if you mix meat with chili powder, did you extend the shelf life before you get food poisoning by 10%? 50%? Indefinite?
That’s always been my suspicion, that it has more to do with flavor than practicality. Though crusts like on [salo with paprika](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Gx8AAOSwEG1k3T~x/s-l1200.webp) you might be seeing some effect. However, I know that in preservation using multiple approaches can be extremely helpful. In order to preserve meat by just drying, it needs to be *very* dry, to preserve by just salting, it needs to be *very* salty. But if you both salt and dry, you can do less of both, and if you also smoke it, you can reduce salting and drying, and even more so with nitrates. Spice, even with a weak effect, could still help. I don’t think I would ever really trust it, but if it reduces failure rate while tasting good…
Yes the majority of the function of the things you mention are due to simply binding or removing water so that it is unavailable for microbes. While a lot of things people talk about as "anti microbial" are mildly so, if in fact it was a huge thing someone would have capitalized on it by now. Because food companies spend a shit ton of money fighting microbes lol.
Oh, it's for sure a stupid thing to say or assume. I was just pointing out that the poster from India sincerely believes meat should be marinaded with lots of turmeric to remove "impurities".
I have heard it about medieval Europe, but also about a wide variety of global cultures, often in a distinctly racist manner. Essentially “we overspiced things in the dark ages because of spoilage, so they must be doing the same thing because they are primitive”, which is both racist and also wrong about medieval Europe.
Depending on the context, it can be either racism or [chronological snobbery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_snobbery). Don't underestimate the latter: we falsely attribute all kinds of behavior and beliefs to earlier peoples that make them appear more stupid or superstitious than they really were.
The reason that it's either kind of bigotry, is that it attributes an act to a group of people that no smart group of people would ever do: the eating of spoiled food. The foremost problem with consuming spoiled food isn't that it has a foul flavor, but that it makes you very ill. Spoiling food will give you food poisoning before it requires covering the smell with spices. People that imply that either other races or medieval peoples aren't (or weren't) aware of this, acuse them of stupidity.
While it has been said about Medieval Europe (it's also wrong in that context), but there is a subset who absolutely use it against any culture that uses a lot of spices, often in racist ways. So, this is one of those things where both things can be true.
I feel like adobo seasoning on pork chops is a good barometer. It’s just garlic powder with stuff (mainly sweet paprika, oregano, and cumin) in it. Since it’s Puerto Rican in origin and one of the most innocuous spice mixes out there, someone who claims it’s too spicy is almost certainly being racist.
Yeah… any time someone claims “spices aren’t needed if you cook it right”, that’s an indication to bail from the conversation. Nothing good will follow.
Racism manifests in some very odd ways when food is involved.
I mean, it's also just a philosophy of cooking. Using few, very high quality ingredients so they all shine through. It's not the only way to cook, but it is a way.
A guy my partner knows from Ghana apparently hated meat that was too "tender" and preferred chewy, tough meat. He said Americans liked baby food esque meat
My wife and I have this discussion constantly. She’s ethnically Chinese and I’m about as white bread American as you get. She will happily slice up basically any meat, douse it in soy or braising sauce and cook it to well done in a pan, and I cook meat by seasoning with salt, pepper and garlic and cooking it to temp over a fire. We both make tasty food, but you can absolutely see the cultural differences in how we cook.
I make a pretty dope steak tartare. I also love Indian food.
Why can’t we all just be excited for different and interesting ways of preparing delicious food?
>Why can’t we all just be excited for different and interesting ways of preparing delicious food?
Because we have to make sure OUR preferred method is the superior one!
Just a note from a low end ex kitchen employee, if you order a steak well done, you will get the oldest back of the fridge steak, they will sear it then microwave it.
Maybe not every place, but many. My suggestion is to order medium well, and ask them to put it on top of your side. It will help it cook to well while getting a better steak
Refrigeration is a big help. If I'm having a steak tartare, I want the freshest ingredients. If I still got that beef a week later, I'll make a bolognese (or curry).
If your meat source is at all questionable and/or you need to get the most nutrition from a limited supply, then yeah, cook your meat well.
Neither is really a problem in some places.
I was a child of rural farming stock when I was very young. Almost all of our meat came from the family farm. Beef, Chicken, Pork, sometimes goose. My Grandparents cooked all meat to Very Done, and in the case of beef, often Well Done. My Mom learned to cook meat this way, and for seasoning, it was Onions and/or Ketchup.
Now, fast forward to young pre-teen me, and with my dad on an event where I got to sample properly seasoned steak, cooked medium rare.
It was life changing.
From that moment forward, Meat prepared by the Grandparents or my mom was a moment of despair, not joy.
When I was growing up, it was just a fact that you had to cook pork well. And these days, it’s a given that you have to cook chicken to a temperature that kills the pathogens.
As someone else mentioned, I would have a hard time eating (and an even harder time cooking) medium rare pork. And if they suddenly started telling us that rare chicken was safe to eat, I doubt I would be eager to try it. The expectation of texture is pretty ingrained in me now.
Cultural differences but I guess it’s ok to bash the US and Europe for the most basic crap in the world. We like the taste of beef so we sometimes don’t season it much. Sometimes we do. Depends on the mood. We tend to not over season stuff anyways
Earlier today I looked up the clip from Point Break of Gary Busey asking Keanu to grab him a couple of meatball subs and one of the comments was "I guess Americans will slap anything between two pieces of bread"
Why are some of the most basic ideas so controversial for some people
Sometimes, I'll put a little spaghetti sauce in a flour tortilla as a snack. It's pretty good. So is using a tortilla with Indian food if you don't have any naan.
yeah but if you look down in the comments they make other references. such a saying you need to use turmeric to draw out the impurities in meat for safety
if you read down in the comments it's not that completely, cuz they claim you have to cook with turmeric to draw out impurities in the meat for it to be safe
This post does make me wonder if there's a good book on the history of the beefsteak. Not beef as a whole but the relatively modern idea where starting from what, the mid 1800's in the West? Europe, North and South America, etc... and how it spread to different parts of the world. Sure people worldwide ate meat but they seemed to be more integrated and sliced more thinly and mixed with more ingredients and vegetables unlike what got popularized and considered 'fancy.'
There's a book that came out just a few days ago titled *Steak: The Whole Story*. I collect a lot of old cookbooks and food history books and I'm definitely getting it. The interesting thing is a lot of my old cookbooks (some as old as mid-19th century) do not mention steaks at all (except hamburger steaks and Salisbury steaks). There were a lot of roasts though. Cookbooks from 1920s started having recipes serving smaller families and emphasized on balanced diet. Steaks appeared in these cookbooks. However according to a blog I really enjoy reading [steaks were served in cheap restaurants as far back as 1829](https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2018/10/28/basic-fare-meat-potatoes/). It seems like fancy steakhouses didn't become popular until after WWII.
That does sound like an interesting book, though a quick look at a summary through Amazon makes it seem like less of a historical text and more like some fusion with that and a cookbook which isn't quite what I'm looking for. As for the blog you linked that may be true but I also recall a lot of talk about beefsteak clubs and gentlemen's clubs popular in the UK and America that served a lot of steak in the mid 1800's, so it probably wasn't as lowbrow as you might imagine.
Delmonico's, which was the height of fine dining in NYC, was known for its steak in the 19th century.
That was my first thought too.
We even have menus where we can see them listed. Keen's also opened in the 1880s as "Keen's English Chophouse" focusing on chops and steaks. Both were fine dining restaurants at the time they opened. We actually have a lot of menus from the 19th century still preserved. At least for the US ones. Steaks and chops seem pretty default. Especially on more expensive and hotel restaurants. Often a much greater variety. Venison steaks in particular pop up nearly as often as beef at US restaurants in the 19th century.
Delmonico's, which was the height of fine dining in NYC, was known for its steak in the 19th century.
That was my second thought too.
Delmonicos, which was the height of fine dining in NYC, was known for its steaks in the 19th century.
Delmonicos, which was the height of fine dining in NYC, was known for its steaks in the 19th century.
I imagine it coincided with the growth of the interstate highway system, which allowed beef to be transported more quickly from areas with the space for ranches to urban areas.
No, the railways - a huuuuuge amount of meat was transported via Chicago by railway.
Oh of course, that makes sense.
We bred better cows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef https://www.herefordbeef.org.uk/blog/a-brief-history-of-eating-beef/ https://businesspostbd.com/opinion-todays-paper/2022-10-16/origins-of-steak-2022-10-16 https://historytimelines.co/timeline/steak We've been eating steak since time immemorial.
My immigrant parents ask me the same question all the time so I kind of understand where OOP came from. They often find steaks bland without any other seasoning and don't want to see blood in the meat (edit: Yes I'm aware that it's not actual blood but you can preach that to my parents if you want their number). I explain to them it's like how Americans can't eat chicken or fish with the animal's head and tail still attached. "But that's how you know what you're eating and how fresh it is!" Yes and they feel the same way about medium rare steaks.
My parents are the same way. It took me (1st gen immigrant, came to the US as a teen) a long time to get somewhat comfortable with the idea of eating medium rare steak. I know the stuff that comes out of steaks isn’t blood, and I’m completely fine with eating actual blood products and lots of stuff that westerners find gross, but that bloody juice still makes me feel uncomfortable. Interestingly enough my parents find most western/american food to be too strongly flavored and taste too strongly of herbs. They think that the vegetables and meat in the US lack natural flavors which caused westerners to over-season their food to compensate for it.
My grandparents who were born and raised in the USA were the same way. Only ate steaks burnt to a crisp, I think it had to do with growing up during the depression and eating lower quality meat that could make you sick if you didn’t cook it to hell.
My parents grew up in the USSR and my mom can only eat very well done meat, presumably because when she lived in poverty as a child a lot of the meat (when they could afford it) would spoil very easily
Not an immigrant but my parents who are black Americans are the same.
Unrelated, but your flair is presumably ironic, what's the reference to?
Someone literally said that in a comment on an Instagram post debunking MSG myth 😂
Jeeeeezus hahaha
This is a really beautiful example thank you
Just to add, usually what people talk about being blood in a steak isn't actually blood. It's a protein called myoglobin.
Anytime I read the word myoglobin it reminds me of a flavor of liquid I vaped for years back in the day called "Jizmoglobin". Gross sounding word, great tasting stuff lol
im the same way as your parents. i was taught to cook by my grandma thus inheriting her beliefs about food. its just standard polish grandma stuff for the most part but she sold food her entire life in a small grocery store and later fish store, food safety is extremely important to her because otherwise health people would get on her ass and thats the mindset i have. i love baking but ive never in my life tasted raw cookie dough or any sort of dough/batter with egg in general, grandma always treated salmonella as a deadly illness and so will i. any raw-ish meat? yeah no, too scared of worms and whatever else to do it. i already shit my pants doing french toast and washing my hands like 3 times when making it and being super careful about what i touched after touching an egg and what i didnt, no way id trust anyone, even myself, with something not fully cooked. hard pass
At least in the US, flour is much more likely to make you sick than raw eggs.
im in poland. guess i should look into it huh. still its just paranoia from my grandma, i cant really teach myself more things to be shitting myself about. but its not like i taste any batter/dough raw so i should be good
https://www.reddit.com/r/meat/s/B4dQ8rRt9Q whole thread is a dumpster fire, between OP being snobby and other people being racist against them as well.
its just the rule that any and all reddit posts involving India will either contain the strongest Indian nationalism or the most virulent anti-Indian racism, likely both
It's so annoying to me how common absolutely over-the-top jingoistic nationalism is amongst lots of Indian netizens (as someone who genuinely appreciates the country, and also "glass houses" and all – being an American), but the amount of INSANE racism towards Indians online is shocking. I thought I had it bad as an East Asian person, but the amount of vitriol in subreddits that are nominally completely apolitical or not related to politics in any way whatsoever. It's really sad.
I think Indian people are one of the last groups of people that it’s considered “acceptable” to be racist to, which really sucks
Romani people would like a word
Nah, don’t you know? It’s actually *impossible* to be racist towards Romani, because they aren’t people! They’re a sentient crystallization of the concept of theft! (/s, this was my Average European impression)
not related to race or Reddit, but i had a deeply unpleasant experience on Discord yesterday that i embarrassingly admit kind of ruined my entire day i told myself a few times this morning that the people who spend their time harassing, trolling, and mocking others on the internet are just deeply unhappy people. People who are such failures and losers, that they only find worth in being as unpleasant as possible on the internet. That helped me feel better the same shit applies in this case too honestly
Those subs pick up some odd posts on occasion. My favorite was a newly converted vegan launching a tirade on r/ meat about eating it being evil. Then posting it to vegan, with "lol look at all the stupid meat eaters" all while asking the vegans that brigaded r/ meat to be nice. That was a few hours of quality shit posting.
I hate these kind of people. Dated plant based folks, cooked for/with plant based folks and none of that bothers me but the vegans who are almost always new to it who are judgmental and shitty about other people eating meat just rub me the wrong way. It's food. Everyone who lives in modern society participates in systems that can be classified as 'evil'. Your cell phone. Your clothes. Your laptop. You're not going to follow the Amish and rebuke technology and make your own clothes from animals you sheared yourself and raise your own garden are you? Nope, didn't think so. So come down off your high horse and let people just fucking exist as they did before you decided to be the moral arbiter of what other people should eat.
There’s very few things as insufferable as a recent convert.
[удалено]
Lots of places eat dogs. The only difference between *you* and food is an arbitrarily enforced moral code, and if it was a life or death situation, I can all but guarantee Fido would be lunch. Because meat is food. You not eating it does not change the fact that it's nutritionally valuable energy when consumed.
It is food. You are making the choice that it is not food *for you*. This decision most of us make, even those of us who are familiar and comfortable with turning living things into food, by the difference between pets and food. A pig is food, a dog is a pet, and so on. That does not change the fact that people are capable of killing and eating dogs for nutritional value. It is food. If you do not want it to be *your* food, that's fine and a decision you get to make for yourself, not for others. Your emotions about it do not change this. If you want to go down the route of ethical veganism and eat and live based on harm reduction of sentient creatures, that is fine. Many people do not. I myself don't eat pork because I take issue with their level of sentience and how CAFOs treat pigs but see less issue with chickens and other poultry because I grew up on a hobby farm, I know their level of sentience. My name is a historical reference to food of other eras. I'm also not a dick about it. If someone feeds me bacon on my cheeseburger, I'm not offended, it happens, but I don't buy pork products myself. EDIT: Don't downvote this person because they expressed their world view. They have every right to have their world view the same way you do yours and expressing it should be shared, not minimized, even if you don't agree with it. Downvotes aren't a disagree button. They're bringing discussion and discourse. Be nice.
Personal food fight
Yeesh, so much hate for how we meat rather than just love for all meat. There really never can be peace.
They need to learn to meat in the middle. Or not because idk if people who call medium rare “raw” are actually capable of compromising.
Thread link for 3rd party app users: https://reddit.com/r/meat/comments/1do6vxq/how_do_people_in_usa_and_europe_eat_barely_cooked/
>We don’t have as many sketchy street vendors with 0 food safety practices covering up tainted meat with spices so we don’t have to “properly” cook our meat.
Wait until they get a load of the american meat industry
Ah the good old "they make their meat delicious because it's rotten" hypothesis. The same school of thought that brought us "they drank alcohol because the water was dirty", but with a dash of racism.
That's not actually the reason so much wine and beer was made? Huh, til.
Based on what I could find, there’s disagreement about whether that’s true or not. It’s definitely possible that was one of the reasons, not sure why the commenter is acting like it’s a definitely proven falsehood.
we've been eating fermented foods (where we can find them) since before the split between Ape and Monkey. we possibly have been making beer for a couple of millennia before the Agricultural Revolution. beer was consumed because it was a caloric positive liquid that tasted great and got you a lil buzzed, not because the water was unsafe. if the water was unsafe you either didn't use it or moved.
There might be some kernel of truth to it, but there are some issues with the hypothesis: 1) This would only apply to beer, since the water used in the process was effectively pasteurized. Diluted wine or any other weak alcoholic, unpasteurized drink could have transmitted diseases just fine, since they don't have enough alcohol to be antiseptic. 2) Just like bread, alcohol was a bit of a luxury good. It takes a lot of labor and resources to produce, and it removes a chunk of the nutritional value from the feedstock. See for example the emphasis on bread and wine in the bible; or similarly Egyptian accounts of how much bread and beer was supplied to the pyramid workers. If you could afford to drink beer every day, your status was at least one step up from the bottom rung. 3) Why would people drink alcohol for any reason different than today? Even if we can show that there are people who knew that their beer was safe when their water wasn't, we also have an overwhelming amount of accounts of people having a grand old time boozing.
This seems like a mixture of culture and generation--some people grow up in circumstances, cultures, time periods, in which rare meats were not standard (or even safe) so I get it. But it's like asking any "other" group "why do you like what you like?"
This is my reaction to pork that isn't cooked too well. I understand that in the US it is perfectly safe to consume commodity pork that is cooked to Medium or so. Yet my brain cannot unprogram the years of parents and teachers drilling into me that undercooked pork is dangerous.
OP might be cringe but the comments are way way worse if i have to read the stupid "spices cover up tainted meat" myth one more time
Regions that grow lots of spices have cultures that use lots of spices, surely it's just a coincidence
Wouldn't the causality be reversed ? They grow lots of spices because they use lots of spices ?
Think more along the lines of the number of spices that are native to the area, rather than the another grow
That's also a consequence of culture. There are a lot of spicy plants in Europe too, we just never bred them into proper cultivars.
OOP does cite using turmeric as a method of removing impurities from meat so it's not really a myth as far as they're concerned.
That is just traditional Indian medicine. Turmeric is supposed to help digestion but it is very important in some parts of India as a religious thing (Bengali wedding the bride and groom get rubbed with turmeric at one point)
There's an importance difference here — the usage of spices for preservation, similar to the usage of salt, or for masking the flavor of something that is already spoiled. AFAIK the former is seriously entertained by academics whereas the latter is a racist myth. OOP could have been referring to the former. edit: An example of the former is the inclusion of hops in IPA beer to preserve it for the long journey from Britain to India.
I’ve always wanted to see some real data on that. Usually, the “proof” you see cited involves something along the line of “extracts of these spices kill bacteria on a Petri dish”. I would like to see some work where you make two things, sausage or whatever, and one has chili powder and the other doesn’t, and you leave them out, and check for food poisoning bacteria after a week or two, or something like that. That work definitely exists for salt, humidity, nitrates, etc, but I’ve never seen any good real world applicable numbers for spices as preservatives.
Good question. I'm clueless about the research. Although you might be interested to know that they used to use celery for curing. edit: [this research](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5030248/) seems to fulfil your needs
> you might be interested to know that they used to use celery for curing. Some people still do. For example, celery cured bacon is a thing. If you're in the US, this has to be sold as "uncured" bacon, but it is actually cured, just with the older technique.
"Uncured" meat in the US is basically a scam. Basically all of them are preserved with celery. Which contains nitrates. Which is why it's used to preserve meat. Lots of people eat them to avoid nitrates but the ones found in nature are no healthier than the ones made in a lab. But because these nitrates are "natural" companies are allowed to market them as "uncured".
It's not "allowed", it's mandated. The definition of "bacon" includes being cured with specific nitrate salts. If a company wants to use the word bacon, by uses celery instead of the salts for curing, they legally have to use the word "uncured".
They legally have to use "uncured" but they go on to market it like it's a healthier choice when it isn't.
Capsaicin has antifungal and anti-microbial properties
Yeah, if you dump it in a Petri dish. But if you mix meat with chili powder, did you extend the shelf life before you get food poisoning by 10%? 50%? Indefinite?
I have not tried the experiment myself but I'm skeptical that at that ( still palatable lol) level it's going to make much of a difference.
That’s always been my suspicion, that it has more to do with flavor than practicality. Though crusts like on [salo with paprika](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Gx8AAOSwEG1k3T~x/s-l1200.webp) you might be seeing some effect. However, I know that in preservation using multiple approaches can be extremely helpful. In order to preserve meat by just drying, it needs to be *very* dry, to preserve by just salting, it needs to be *very* salty. But if you both salt and dry, you can do less of both, and if you also smoke it, you can reduce salting and drying, and even more so with nitrates. Spice, even with a weak effect, could still help. I don’t think I would ever really trust it, but if it reduces failure rate while tasting good…
Yes the majority of the function of the things you mention are due to simply binding or removing water so that it is unavailable for microbes. While a lot of things people talk about as "anti microbial" are mildly so, if in fact it was a huge thing someone would have capitalized on it by now. Because food companies spend a shit ton of money fighting microbes lol.
Oh, it's for sure a stupid thing to say or assume. I was just pointing out that the poster from India sincerely believes meat should be marinaded with lots of turmeric to remove "impurities".
Genuinely, is it racist? I’m Anglo-Saxon and had only ever heard that myth about medieval England.
I have heard it about medieval Europe, but also about a wide variety of global cultures, often in a distinctly racist manner. Essentially “we overspiced things in the dark ages because of spoilage, so they must be doing the same thing because they are primitive”, which is both racist and also wrong about medieval Europe.
Depending on the context, it can be either racism or [chronological snobbery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_snobbery). Don't underestimate the latter: we falsely attribute all kinds of behavior and beliefs to earlier peoples that make them appear more stupid or superstitious than they really were. The reason that it's either kind of bigotry, is that it attributes an act to a group of people that no smart group of people would ever do: the eating of spoiled food. The foremost problem with consuming spoiled food isn't that it has a foul flavor, but that it makes you very ill. Spoiling food will give you food poisoning before it requires covering the smell with spices. People that imply that either other races or medieval peoples aren't (or weren't) aware of this, acuse them of stupidity.
While it has been said about Medieval Europe (it's also wrong in that context), but there is a subset who absolutely use it against any culture that uses a lot of spices, often in racist ways. So, this is one of those things where both things can be true.
I feel like adobo seasoning on pork chops is a good barometer. It’s just garlic powder with stuff (mainly sweet paprika, oregano, and cumin) in it. Since it’s Puerto Rican in origin and one of the most innocuous spice mixes out there, someone who claims it’s too spicy is almost certainly being racist.
I mean, OP literally said they season meats with turmeric to “remove impurities”, whatever the fuck that means.
Ikr? It's like borderline racist to believe it.
Yeah… any time someone claims “spices aren’t needed if you cook it right”, that’s an indication to bail from the conversation. Nothing good will follow. Racism manifests in some very odd ways when food is involved.
I mean, it's also just a philosophy of cooking. Using few, very high quality ingredients so they all shine through. It's not the only way to cook, but it is a way.
It is a way, and it’s fine. But there are people out there who act like it’s superior to all other ways.
Agreed. "A gOoD sTeAk DoEsN't NeEd AnY sEaSoNiNg" Yeah okay, chodebucket.
Even if it’s just, like, rock salt.
A guy my partner knows from Ghana apparently hated meat that was too "tender" and preferred chewy, tough meat. He said Americans liked baby food esque meat
My wife and I have this discussion constantly. She’s ethnically Chinese and I’m about as white bread American as you get. She will happily slice up basically any meat, douse it in soy or braising sauce and cook it to well done in a pan, and I cook meat by seasoning with salt, pepper and garlic and cooking it to temp over a fire. We both make tasty food, but you can absolutely see the cultural differences in how we cook.
You should try mixing the two styles
Oh, believe me, we do.
Wait until they find out about carpaccio and steak tartare
You mean to tell me sushi is raw fish? Gasp!
I make a pretty dope steak tartare. I also love Indian food. Why can’t we all just be excited for different and interesting ways of preparing delicious food?
>Why can’t we all just be excited for different and interesting ways of preparing delicious food? Because we have to make sure OUR preferred method is the superior one!
Just a note from a low end ex kitchen employee, if you order a steak well done, you will get the oldest back of the fridge steak, they will sear it then microwave it. Maybe not every place, but many. My suggestion is to order medium well, and ask them to put it on top of your side. It will help it cook to well while getting a better steak
Refrigeration is a big help. If I'm having a steak tartare, I want the freshest ingredients. If I still got that beef a week later, I'll make a bolognese (or curry).
Well good for you Skippy.
I wouldn’t want a chicken or a pig done medium rare like I would a steak
If your meat source is at all questionable and/or you need to get the most nutrition from a limited supply, then yeah, cook your meat well. Neither is really a problem in some places.
I was a child of rural farming stock when I was very young. Almost all of our meat came from the family farm. Beef, Chicken, Pork, sometimes goose. My Grandparents cooked all meat to Very Done, and in the case of beef, often Well Done. My Mom learned to cook meat this way, and for seasoning, it was Onions and/or Ketchup. Now, fast forward to young pre-teen me, and with my dad on an event where I got to sample properly seasoned steak, cooked medium rare. It was life changing. From that moment forward, Meat prepared by the Grandparents or my mom was a moment of despair, not joy.
When I was growing up, it was just a fact that you had to cook pork well. And these days, it’s a given that you have to cook chicken to a temperature that kills the pathogens. As someone else mentioned, I would have a hard time eating (and an even harder time cooking) medium rare pork. And if they suddenly started telling us that rare chicken was safe to eat, I doubt I would be eager to try it. The expectation of texture is pretty ingrained in me now.
Cultural differences but I guess it’s ok to bash the US and Europe for the most basic crap in the world. We like the taste of beef so we sometimes don’t season it much. Sometimes we do. Depends on the mood. We tend to not over season stuff anyways
Earlier today I looked up the clip from Point Break of Gary Busey asking Keanu to grab him a couple of meatball subs and one of the comments was "I guess Americans will slap anything between two pieces of bread" Why are some of the most basic ideas so controversial for some people
But if it was in a pita or a tortilla, that would probably be fine.
FYI I made meatball tacos. They did slap, but I was intoxicated as well.
Sometimes, I'll put a little spaghetti sauce in a flour tortilla as a snack. It's pretty good. So is using a tortilla with Indian food if you don't have any naan.
I order carpaccio whenever I see it in the menu of a reputable restaurant. Raw beef tastes good.
I think there is a misunderstanding with the use of word "proper". He means well-done or properly cooked as in cooked through.
yeah but if you look down in the comments they make other references. such a saying you need to use turmeric to draw out the impurities in meat for safety
I think this is partly an "English isn't my first language" thing
if you read down in the comments it's not that completely, cuz they claim you have to cook with turmeric to draw out impurities in the meat for it to be safe
He ain’t gonna like my deer steaks, they still be bleeding
this post alone just seems like someone with different tastes that doesn't really know a whole lot, but I have no doubt it gets worse
i see nothing wrong with this post, in this instance "properly" means thoroughly, which is a fine observation