Free Beaten, Seared, and Sauced by Jonathan Dixon Page A

the
On Food and Cooking
sections we were supposed to read: “The body tissues of animals eaten as food. According to McGee.”
    When he credited Harold McGee I saw a shimmer of panic run over a few of the others in class. It isn’t easy reading, and when I was going through it, I’d predicted that more than a few would bail out after a paragraph or two.
    After Adam, he went alphabetically. Stephen got his question right; Dylan did not. Stephen got several points’ credit for the correct answer; Dylan was docked several points for his inability to answer.
    I was asked: “List the species names of meats used in food service.” I got my points for “Bovine, ovine, swine, poultry, and game.” The questions went on.
    During the lecture we learned basic things—tender meats should be dry cooked, tougher meat from the motion muscles asks for slow, moist heat cooking—and more complex things, like the precise physical makeup of lean muscle tissue (72% water, 20% protein, 7% fat, 1% minerals including iron, calcium, and selenium).
    Sebald’s German accent—with the same lilts and cadences as Werner Herzog’s—was sometimes difficult to understand. The mind tends to turn unfamiliar sounds into sounds you recognize. I’d be takingnotes, hearing a normal set of sentences: “The chuck is one of the primal cuts of a side of beef. The round is another primal cut, and its subprimals are the knuckle, eye, top round …” etc. And then I could swear he had just said something like: “Night tracking turns nighttime to birds.” As classes went on, we’d often look at one another in bewilderment. Naturally, all of us loved the guy.
    When several hours had passed that first day, after we had learned the anatomy of a steer carcass, about USDA grading systems and inspection methods, about fat-to-lean ratios, we went to the meat room in the basement to get our hands dirty.
    Have you ever smelled a piece of aged beef? That funky, almost rotten-dairy scent that clings to the meat when it’s been hung in the cold air to dry? We could smell an intensified version of that the farther down the stairs we went and the nearer the room we got. Even once we’d been inside the room for a while, we’d still notice the scent.
    This was a busy area. Meat-free dishes did not hold a place of prevalence on CIA menus, and all the meat used in all the kitchens came out of this room. A lot of it would be processed by students like us, but a lot of it came in from the vendors and was broken down by the teaching assistants, the instructors, or one of the full-time guys hired to keep track of incoming and outgoing material. The really well-cut stuff went to the restaurants the school operated on the campus.
    Three large supports were spaced in the center of the room, with a worktable on each side of each support. There was another row of tables along one wall. An instructor’s table was placed up front, with a huge meat grinder behind it, and on the far right side of the room was a band saw, Cryovac machines, and a hand-washing sink. A small antechamber beyond that contained an immense walk-in refrigerator and a stunningly cold freezer. Fluorescent bulbs burned an incandescent white overhead.
    We chose a workspace upon entering, got ourselves cutting boards, and put on one of the heavy-duty aprons hanging on hooks by the instructor’s table. These things weighed about ten pounds and felt bulletproof. Sebald explained why they were a necessity; if your knifeslipped while butchering a piece of meat, you did not want to run the risk of stabbing yourself in the stomach, or your groin. “I’ve seen some pretty nasty accidents …” Sebald said.
    He pulled out a sharpening stone and showed us how to use it. He showed us when and how to use a boning knife, when to use the standard chef’s knife, when to resort to our paring knives. There was a huge bin of beef beside him and when he was done with the demo, we pulled a piece out and took it back to our