Year of the Cow (6 page)

That done, and the boy still sleeping, I pause for a moment. I have to wait for this pot roast now. In the meantime, I seem to have a moment to myself. It's weird. I sit down on the couch with my laptop to sort my inbox, really out of habit more than anything else.

“Daddy?” I turn. Declan stands in the doorway, rubbing eyes still half-closed from sleep.

“What's up, little man?”

“I want Mommy.” The universal proclamation of sick kids everywhere.

“I know, buddy. I miss her, too. How's your tummy?”

“Hurts.” He fights against a lower lip quiver and almost wins. “Where's Mommy?”

“She's at work, buddy. But she'll be home real soon.” Tears begin to well up in his eyes, so I continue. “Wanna come sit on my lap?”

I set my laptop aside and he clambers into my arms, head resting on my chest. We sit there for a long moment. If there is a silver lining to this particular dark cloud of childhood contagion, it is in moments like these. I haven't gotten to spend this much weekday time with Declan in months. Though I certainly wish he felt better, this time together is quietly lovely. “Do you want me to sing a song, D.?”

“No,” he replies. “I want an imagination story.” A story I make up.

“You got it.” I pet his back and continue. “Once upon a time, there was a ladybug.”

“A ladybug?”

“Not just any ladybug. A
giant
ladybug.”

“What was his name?”

“His name was Murray.”

*   *   *

Three hours later, the boy is asleep and the house smells amazing. Savory and earthy and slightly acrid from the wine. I check the meat, and it disintegrates at a touch. Dinner is near.

I start some polenta with Parmesan and remove the meat to a foil-tented plate. My dog, Basil, will disappear this meat like a spy in Smolensk if I turn my back, so I stash the plate in the microwave to keep it safe. I strain the braising liquid into a bowl, then add the liquid back to the casserole dish, put a fire under it, and reduce it to build a sauce. When it coats the back of a spoon, I add in a little butter. In classic French cuisine, this is called
monter au beurre
and gives the sauce a glossy finish. I like glossy finishes.

When Summer returns home, I dish her a bowl of cheesy polenta, topped with chunks of tender, melt-in-your-mouth beef and a Shiraz-reduction pan sauce.

“I want our house to always smell this way,” Summer says over dinner. The meat is rich and gently sweet, mixed with the dry nuttiness of the polenta.

That is to say: This is good. Real good.

I'm kind of amazed.
I
made this?

“Thanks.” I smile. “I'm glad you're digging it.”

“How'd it go today?” she asks.

“It was okay. He slept a lot,” I answer. “You?”

“Good. Productive. Hard to be away, though.”

“I know. We missed you. Dec especially.”

“Dec especially?” she teases.

“You know what I meant. It's nice having the band back together. I mean, when we aren't running higgledy-piggledy all over the place.”

“I bet. I don't like that Declan's sick today, or anything. But I can see how it'd be nice to spend a whole day with him. Without a whole weekend to-do list to worry about, I mean.”

I take another bite of my dinner. Pensive. “Is it weird that two moderately capable people barely have the time to manage their household, keep up with their careers, and also parent a little boy?”

“I don't know.” Summer shrugs. “The question of our time, I suppose.”

“Man, we're busy.”

She nods. “That we are.”

 

Red Wine–Braised Chuck Roast

Time: 3 to 5 hours

Serves 4 to 6

Braising transforms tougher cuts into gorgeous, tender dishes that will make your whole house smell amazing. Cooking in a moist environment over low heat changes a connective tissue called collagen into a different substance, gelatin. The result: incredibly tender meat and a beautiful, naturally thickened sauce.

Perfect cuts for this will come off the chuck—chuck roast, arm roast, chuck eye roast, blade roast—but cuts off the round can work, too.

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons kosher salt

2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

1 (2- to 3-pound) chuck roast

Canola oil (or coconut oil, ghee, bacon fat, or lard)

1 white onion, diced

2 carrots, diced

1 rib celery, diced

2 cloves garlic, sliced

1 (750-milliliter) bottle red wine

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into cubes

  
1.
Preheat the oven to 300°F.

  
2.
Combine the flour, salt, and pepper. Dredge the meat in the mixture until well covered. (Alternatively, you can omit the flour and simply season liberally with salt and pepper.)

  
3.
In a Dutch oven a little larger than the roast, sear the meat on all sides over high heat in just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan. Remove the meat and set it aside.

  
4.
Add a little more oil to the pot, add the onion, carrots, celery, and garlic, and cook over medium heat for a few minutes, until they're aromatic and slightly translucent. Scrape the bottom of the pot to release any stuck-on browned bits.

  
5.
Pour in the wine and bring to a simmer.

  
6.
Add the meat; the liquid should cover at least two-thirds of the roast. (If it doesn't, add a little water.) Cover the pot and transfer to the oven.

  
7.
Cook, covered, for several hours, until the meat falls apart at the slightest touch or whisper of its name. The liquid should be simmering—bubbling every second or two—not boiling. If it's bubbling too vigorously, turn down the heat. Check the level of the liquid every 45 minutes or so. If the level drops to cover less than half the meat, add hot water to bring the level back up to two-thirds. Total braising time will vary. The dish is done when the meat is very, very tender.

Everything up to this point can be done up to a day in advance, if you wish. If preparing in advance, let the meat cool in the braising liquid. Then, when preparing the actual meal, reheat the dish over low heat and proceed as directed.

  
8.
Remove the pot from the oven. Stash the meat on a plate and loosely tent with foil.

  
9.
Time to make a sauce. Strain the braising liquid, discarding the solids, and return the liquid to the Dutch oven. Boil the liquid, uncovered, for 10 to 15 minutes over medium-high heat until the liquid is reduced and coats the back of a spoon.

10.
Remove from the heat, add the butter, and stir until the butter melts.

11.
Slice the roast and serve over a starch of your choice, topped with a few spoonfuls of the sauce. Wild rice, polenta, and mashed potatoes are all excellent starch options.

If you have an extra bottle of the wine you braised in, serve it at the table. It's classy.

 

3

Heritage

“You bought a what?”

“No, you heard right. I bought a cow.” It's noonish. I'm in a diner too hip for its zip code, sitting across the table from my friend Mike. He's a television editor I used to work with, a paragon of dry wit and keen intellect. Los Angeles by way of Chicago. We do lunch from time to time.

“Well, what are you going to do with it?”

“Eat it.”

“You're gonna die.”

“I'm not gonna eat it all at once,” I counter. “Nobody's trying to reenact a Monty Python scene here.”

“You're gonna get so sick of beef.”

“Maybe. I'm gonna try not to repeat myself, though. Try and make the most of the beast. Branch out. See what I can learn.”

“Well, good luck to you, man. It's honest, at least. That's a hell of a thing.” He raises a glass. “Here's to your cardiovascular health,” he toasts with a wry gallows grin.

I raise my own glass. “To a hell of a thing.”

Our glasses tap, and he continues. “So, this cow. Is it a heifer, then? What are you working with here?”

*   *   *

First things first: I should really stop calling this beast a cow. Technically speaking, a cow is a girl of the species, specifically one that's had a calf. (Girl cattle that haven't had a calf are indeed called heifers.) The beast in my backyard is actually a steer. A boy cattle, if you will. Boy cattle that have been—ahem—“fixed” are steers, and steers that have been trained as draft animals are oxen. Boy cattle left unaltered are bulls.

That's a lot of terms for different ages and sexes of what is essentially one species—but cattle have been with us a long time. It stands to reason that we'd have a huge number of very specific terms to describe them. Similar highly specific language has cropped up around sheep and chickens, for example—themselves agricultural staples we've long relied on.

This steer came to my house in the back of a Prius from Oroville, and as a species, it's come even further. Yet in our imaginations, beef is the quintessential American food, associated with wide-open spaces, the Wild Wild West, and backyard barbecues everywhere.

How precisely this happened can't be completely definitively answered. But we know of some key moments—sort of a
This Is Your Life
review of American beef cattle.

Ten thousand years ago, what we think of as modern beef cattle didn't exist. Instead, a species of massive horned ungulate dominated the landscape from Spain, all across Europe and North Africa, and through large swaths of Asia. This was the aurochs (like “deer,” the plural and singular version of the word is the same). And by any measure, aurochs were terrifying.

A complete aurochs skeleton can be seen on display in the National Museum of Denmark. The animal stood six feet tall at the shoulder and weighed in the neighborhood of 2,200 pounds. That's about twice as heavy as my steer weighed when it was alive and somewhere around ten inches taller, give or take. (My animal provided me with 420 pounds of beef, but the steer on the hoof weighed much more.) Aurochs were more comparable in size to American buffalo (or bison, if you prefer) than beef cattle.

The aurochs on display in Denmark was found along with three stone arrowheads fired by Mesolithic hunters. The arrows didn't bring the beast down, though—he fled and drowned in a bog. The hunters were denied a meal, but they were also spared what could have been the fight of their lives. Even wounded, the aurochs were more than capable of killing a human.

Aurochs are depicted in the famous Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux as fearsome beasts. They share wall space with rhinos and bears—animals firmly at the other end of the kill-or-be-killed spectrum. In a Lascaux chamber called the Hall of the Bulls, two tremendous black aurochs dominate the walls. The largest of the two animals is a whopping seventeen feet long, drawn so that the natural curvature and undulation of the water-carved walls accent the musculature of the beast. Clearly, these animals were revered, even in prehistory.

Nobody knows precisely
how
the first cattle were domesticated from aurochs—Neolithic hunter-gatherers didn't keep written accounts. All we have to go on are the archaeological record, a timeline of genetic changes coaxed from cattle DNA, and a rough history gleaned from those pictures daubed on the walls of caves. From these, we can tell that the first cattle were likely domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, approximately 8,800 years ago. These cattle would eventually become
Bos taurus,
or the taurine cattle breeds. Then, fifteen hundred years later, in the Indus Valley along what is now the India/Pakistan border, a second domestication event occurred, giving rise to the cattle that would become
Bos indicus,
or the modern zebu.

Two domestication events, giving rise to all the cattle in the world. Domestication is rare, and domestication of a bad-tempered herd animal the size of a Volkswagen is rarer still. Then, as Neolithic humans spread out from the cradles of civilization, they took their cattle with them. Very generally, the taurine cattle breeds went west, and the zebu went east.

These new bovine allies conferred tremendous benefits on human populations. Cows eat grass. Suddenly, grassland could be converted into a reliable protein source without the risk associated with hunting game. Cattle could provide enough milk to feed both their own offspring and their human herders, allowing humans to incorporate dairy into their diets on a regular basis. Hides could be converted into any number of leather goods, and—though over time they became generally smaller than aurochs—domesticated cattle were the best source of draft power available.

Aurochs didn't immediately vanish, however. They still roamed Europe during the time of the Romans, where they were popular antagonists in the arenas of the empire. Julius Caesar himself noted in his
Commentaries
on the Gallic War
that aurochs were “a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast.… But not even when they are taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed.” The last true aurochs died in 1627 in a forest in Poland.