15 August 2007

Steak-frites

The meal most often served in French cafés and restaurants is steak and French fries — steak-frites, as they say. For decades it's been the French version of our American burger and fries, but with the advent of McDonald's and other fast-food chains, I wonder if the burger isn't now catching up. (Hamburgers catch up... ketchup... ha ha ha.)

French steaks are very lean pieces of meat. Some Americans are put off by them, because they are so different from the "marbled" corn-fed beef we are used to eating in the States. Steaks in France do have a different flavor compared to U.S. beef, and I assume that too is because the cattle graze on grass. The steaks you get in French restaurants or cafés are often a lot smaller than American steaks, too.

A French-style steak-frites, served with sauce béarnaise.
The lean French beef is good served with rich buttery sauces.

The word for beef in French is bœuf, which is also the word for the animal we call an ox. In English, we have one word for the name of the animal and a different word for the name of the meat we eat (sheep/mutton, pig/pork, and so on). In French, the language uses the same term for both, so you eat pig, sheep, or ox directly, not indirectly, if you see what I mean.

The different cuts of beef that are grilled as steaks (variously spelled steak, steack, biftek, or bifteck) are bavette (flank steak), entrecôte (ribeye), rumsteck (rumpsteak, according to the dictionary, or round steak, I think), faux-filet (sirloin), and tournedos or filet de bœuf. If you want a thicker steak, you order a pavé de bœuf — literally, a "paving stone" of beef. I think it's often pavé de rumsteak.

All the French cuts of meat are slightly different from the U.S. cuts because the meat itself is different and so are the butchering techniques and conventions. For example, there's a cut called onglet, which the Robert-Collins dictionary doesn't translate but just calls "prime cut of beef" (in italics in the dictionary). I think it might be called hanger steak in America — or is it skirt steak? Or are they the same thing? By the way, filet mignon is a term that in the U.S. applies to beef, but in France means pork, specifically pork tenderloin.

Because the French steaks are so lean, they tend to get very tough if they are cooked much past medium-rare, and in France well-done steaks are considered inedible by many. In response to the question « Quelle cuisson pour le steak ? » (How do you like it done?), the correct answers are bleue (very rare — almost raw, really — just flipped over in the pan and slightly browned on each side) or saignante (which more or less means "bloody" or very rare).

According to the dictionary, saignant as a degree of doneness means « viande rôtie ou grillée, peu cuite et dans laquelle il reste du sang » — meat roasted or grilled but only lightly cooked and in which there remains some blood. Bleu as applied to meat means « Très saignant, à peine grillé » — very rare, barely grilled.

Another acceptable answer to the degree-of-doneness question about steaks is à point, which means "just right" but usually comes out as about medium rare in American terms. In theory it means "medium" but as anywhere, the actual degree of doneness you'll get if you order your steak à point will vary from place to place and time to time. Cooking beef is not exactly a science. Judged by American standards, the French tend to undercook their steaks.

On an Internet travel forum I participate in, an American woman on her first trip to France wrote in and said that after eating at one Paris café, she had realized it was a terrible restaurant because the steak was hardly cooked at all. "It was like eating beef sushi," she said. "I'm used to raw fish, but I like my beef just slightly pink, not raw." I told her that that was how steak is served in France — nearly raw — unless you specify that it be cooked more thoroughly, and that the café is question is not a bad restaurantat all, IMHO. I've eaten there three or four times and enjoyed it. It's all a matter of conventions and expectations.

This was yesterday's lunch. Béarnaise is a hollandaise sauce
that is made using a reduction of vinegar, white wine, shallots,
and tarragon as its base. And lots of butter and egg yolks, bien sûr.


I haven't had a hamburger in a French restaurant in many years, but I remember from time gone by that the hamburger would be made very thick out of very lean meat and served extremely rare. If you were expecting an American-style hamburger, it was surprising or even off-putting to be served such a rare patty of almost purple ground beef.

So if you really like your steak cooked well-done — well, then don't order steak in France. That's what a typical French person would tell you. Cooked well-done, it won't be good, or even edible. It's too tough, and it'll be dry. In French, well-done is bien cuit — well cooked — but you don't even need to know that expression!

10 comments:

  1. Hi Ken !


    (grin) When Amerloque takes dyed-in-the-wool Americans from his American family out for dinner, and when they order "steak", Amerloque always tells the waiter "il/elle veut un steck carbonisé" so that the American diner will be happy.


    What's always fun, too, is to order a "hamburger on a horse" for the kids. (wider grin) Sometimes the parents go ballistic when they see the egg yolk, though …


    Best,
    L'Amerloque

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  2. Very interesting post, Ken.
    About the size of food plates in the States, or maybe I should say food platters, I had forgotten how big they were! I need a doggie-bag for practically everything, and yet, as we say in French, j'ai un bon coup de fourchette.

    I think you are right, dictionaries give you translations about the different pieces of meat, but the way of cutting the meat is totally different. So one has to try different things and make one's one mind about what one likes!

    The only animal which has two different names in French, is pork, le porc being the food and le cochon, being on its two feet (pieds de cochon, of course)

    I usually order my meat à point, expecting it to be saignant, and it usually works.
    Now the other day, in Manchester, I did the same thing and got my steak totally carbonisé!

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  3. Oh my gosh, that looks so good - you're making me hungry and it's only 9:30 a.m. where I am!

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  4. One of the interesting things about the history of English is the way class distinctions evolved. You note that in English we differentiate between the animal and the corresponding meat. In each case, the name for the animal (cow, pig or swine, sheep) is Old English or Anglo-Saxon in derivation. The classier name for the meat (beef, pork, mutton) is Anglo-French. In the post-1066 England, French words were considered to be much more elegant than Anglo-Saxon ones, so the A-S terms were relegated to the barnyard while only the French terms were permitted in the dining room.

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  5. Looks yummy! I assume you make your own Bearnaise. Is this the most complicated part of the meal?

    I like my meat medium rare, but really bloody is a turnoff. I guess there are no issues with undercooked meat in France (E. Coli, for example).

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  6. Very interesting post. I have looked up the translations of all of those steak cuts but never seem to be able to memorize them. I love a GOOD steak-frites, but still have a soft spot in my heart (and stomach) for American steaks.

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  7. It is interesting how we have all these pairs of words in modern English, usually one of Anglo-Saxon origin and another of Anglo-Norman (French ) origin.

    The other day on a travel forum I saw that somebody talked about eating "sheep meat" on a trip to southern France. Just the expression is kind of shocking, isn't it? It's mutton (or lamb), dammit.

    I think E. coli is a problem in ground meat, not whole pieces of meat, isn't it? It's there because the meat is ground industrially and parts of the animal (guts and their contents) are ground in with the meat. The E. coli bacteria live in the animal's gut.

    If you grind your own beef, using good fresh cuts of meat, you avoid all that. I don't even like the idea of buying and eating already-ground beef any more.

    In French butcher shops and at the butcher counter at the supermarket, you can have beef ground to order. So you can see what goes into the grinder and feel better about eating what comes out the other end.

    The French term carbonisé is probably obvious, but it means something like "burned to a crisp." American steaks, which are much fattier (we use the euphemism "marbled") can stand such cooking, but the lean French beef is not good cooked to that degree.

    It's quite a surprise for Americans to see that hamburger with an egg "on horseback," I know. Just like it's a surprise to see a sunny-side-up egg sitting in the middle of French pizza.

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  8. Hi Ken !


    /*/ …/… In French butcher shops and at the butcher counter at the supermarket, you can have beef ground to order. So you can see what goes into the grinder and feel better about eating what comes out the other end. …/… /*/


    Actually, it's even better than that. (grin) It's not a question of "can" but a question of "must".


    In France, grinding up the meat ahead of time and putting it on sale is basically prohibited by law.


    // …/… Enfin, les opérations de malaxage, de hachage, de tranchage (etc.) sont délicates car elles
    augmentent les surfaces d’exposition tout en disséminant les germes contaminants. Il faut donc savoir que la réglementation interdit de préparer de la « viande hachée » à l’avance. Elle doit
    être préparée à la demande et au vu du client. …/…

    http://tinyurl.com/2zbknc


    In a butcher shop, the customer must request that a given piece of meat be ground, and it must be ground in plain sight (and the weighing must take place after the grinding, and not before …). The butcher cannot simply grind it up any old piece of meat, display it, and tried to palm it off as "ground beef". He/She would be (and frequently is) heavily fined.


    So how, might one ask, do the hypermarkets and supermarkets get away with displaying prepackaged ground beef ?


    For several reasons:


    1 – By law there must be a qualified butcher on the premises, at least for a portion of opening hours. Frequently one can see him or her working behind a thick glass window. The thinking goes that the butcher "has just ground the meat" ...

    2 - ... and so the DGCCRF (Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes, i.e., the Consumer Fraud Squad) does not write up a ticket, because there is what in French is called a "tolerance" coming from the Ministry. The illegal behavior (grinding and packaging the meat) is "tolerated" but it should not be "abused". In the hypers and supers, a simple way to find out if there is a butcher working there is to request that a piece of meat be ground up. One simply points at a "bavette", for example and requests grinding. Theoretically there should be no problem. It might take some time, though … (grin) …


    3 - With all the mad cow scares, there have been new rules and regulations implemented for public safety. For example, it states quite clearly in the regulations dealing with la vache folle that "LA VIANDE HACHEE NE PEUT ETRE VENDUE QUE CONDITIONNEE PAR UN ETABLISSEMENT AGREE". That means concretely that meat can be ground up, and packaged by an "authorized establishment". It can then be sold.


    Howver, in a typically French fashion (grin), the rule set forth in section (3) above does not supercede or replace the rules in (1) and (2) above: it simply is in addition to them. (grin)


    M and Mme Amerloque don't buy pre-ground meat in hyper/supermarkets, either. (wider grin)


    Best,
    L'Amerloque

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  9. The fact is that there is frozen ground beef for sale in the supermarkets, and it's not a store brand. So it has obviously been ground up somewhere else besides in the store by a butcher working there.

    There is also ground pork for sale, both in the butcher counter (and not ground in sight of the customer) and in packages labeled Louis Armel or some other nationally distributed brand.

    You don't have to buy it, of course. You can ask that your beef be ground before your very eyes. You cannot, however, have lamb, turkey, chicken, or other meats ground at the supermarket. Their grinders are for beef only.

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  10. Hi Ken !


    /*/ The fact is that there is frozen ground beef for sale in the supermarkets, and it's not a store brand. So it has obviously been ground up somewhere else besides in the store by a butcher working there./*/


    Yes: it is meat ground up and packaged by an "authorized establishment" as per para (3-) above. Charal, as far as Amerloque knows, has been the largest French preparer/grinder/distributor, but Amerloque hasn't looked at any recent stats to check who the current leader is …


    /*/ There is also ground pork for sale, both in the butcher counter (and not ground in sight of the customer) and in packages labeled Louis Armel or some other nationally distributed brand./*/


    Again, it's the "authorized establishment" rule. There is the whole question of sausages, too: again, it's frequently the "authorized establishment" which grinds/cases/distributes, and not the local super/hyper. As Ken points out, one never really knows what goes into the store-prepared sausages … (grin)


    /*/.You don't have to buy it, of course. You can ask that your beef be ground before your very eyes. You cannot, however, have lamb, turkey, chicken, or other meats ground at the supermarket. Their grinders are for beef only./*/


    Amerloque found – once, a donkey's years ago – that one was theoretically able to ask for meats other than beef to be ground in the supermarket, and that the grinder was not necessarily reserved for beef. That was well before the "mad cow" scare: if Amerloque recalls correctly the powers-that-be decided at that time that the store grinder was to be reserved for "beef" only. Ceci peut expliquer cela. (grin)


    For over a decade, the hypers/supers have been putting quite a lot of pressure on the gov't (and on the EU) to change some of the rules and regulations concerning food products (especially meats and meat products) so as to ensure "modern" distribution methods. Of course, sometimes this lobbying hits consumers such as Ken and Amerloque who prefer to know exactly what is in the meats they eat. (smile)


    Best,
    L'Amerloque

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