Year of the Cow (7 page)

Meanwhile, the taurine cattle multiplied and diversified into animals of all shapes and sizes: huge white cattle in France, mousy-brown cattle in Switzerland, short-horned red cattle in England, shaggy brown cattle in the highlands of Scotland. Then in the late 1800s, cattlemen began actually recording their pairings, leading to the formalization of many of today's cattle breeds: France's Charolais, Switzerland's Braunvieh, England's Shorthorn, Scotland's Highland cattle.

Speaking of Scotland, the beef in my backyard came from a Red Angus/Black Angus cross—named for County Angus on the northeast coast of Scotland, where the breed began in the eighteenth century. There, in the counties of Aberdeen and Angus, the native cattle were a unique strain of hornless, or polled, cattle. These cattle came to be called
humbles,
for their lack of horns, or
doddies,
because names are more fun when they sound utterly ridiculous.

These cattle were something of a curiosity, until a breeder named Hugh Watson began assembling a herd of doddies in County Angus. Watson came from a family of cattle breeders and had a knack for breeding the animals to bring out the traits he was looking for. In Angus, he developed a herd of polled cattle of exceptionally high quality—strong, symmetrical animals with gentle dispositions. Besides breeding exceptional animals, however, Watson had two notable insights. First, he showed them off, taking the animals to livestock shows to tout their quality far more than was common at the time. And second—he selected only for animals that were entirely jet black.

Hugh Watson was branding. Not in the
Ponderosa,
iron-in-a-fire sense, but in the modern marketing sense. He was forging a brand identity.

At a time when most steers were multicolored, Watson's jet-black animals stood out. And they were naturally hornless, which also stood out. And because he was an excellent breeder, they were big, beautiful examples of the species, which definitely stood out. As a result, Watson's distinctive beasts started winning livestock competitions. And they won a lot.

Watson's herd was the foundation of what would become known as the Aberdeen-Angus breed. Other breeders in those counties started breeding for similar characteristics. Then in 1867, Queen Victoria herself accepted a gift of beef from an Aberdeen-Angus steer for her Christmas dinner, and the Aberdeen-Angus was famous.

The first Aberdeen-Angus cattle arrived in the United States in 1873, when George Grant, a Scottish expat, transported four bulls to Kansas with a mind toward starting an empire. He called his new town Victoria, after the monarch who enjoyed Aberdeen-Angus beef. That fall, two of the bulls were shown at the Kansas City Livestock Exhibition. American cattlemen, however, weren't used to seeing polled cattle and considered them freakish. Grant's venture failed, and he died penniless a few years later.

The Aberdeen-Angus cattle, however, had arrived. They proved adaptable and hardy on the High Plains, and an American breeders association opened ten years later. In 1917, the association forbade the registration of any nonblack cattle, in accordance with Watson's desire for a solid black breed (hence,
Black Angus
). Then in the 1950s, the name was shortened to the American Angus Association. Today, Angus cattle are the most prevalent beef cattle breed in the United States.

My steer, however, isn't a Black Angus. It's a Red Angus/Black Angus cross. As one might surmise, the difference is a matter of coloration. Black is a dominant genetic trait in Angus; red is recessive. (Really, it's more of a reddish brown, but who am I to quibble?) Watson, back in the 1800s, kept only the black individuals, and other breeders followed his lead to capitalize on the marketing campaign that Watson had set in motion.

In the United States, however, savvy ranchers quickly realized that quality animals were being eliminated from Black Angus herds simply because of their color. Some ranchers began buying up these otherwise excellent
Red Angus
. In 1954, the Red Angus Association of America was founded.

My Red Angus/Black Angus cross, then, is an Angus steer, without regard to coloration. I like that. I like that my rancher valued form and function over fashion. Seeing
Angus beef
in restaurants or supermarkets is a branding statement—just as it was for Hugh Watson's herd in the early 1800s. It isn't necessarily an indicator of quality in the same way that, say, Prime, Choice, or Select is. It's an indicator of the breed of steer that the beef came from.

Because Angus beef reaches full size so quickly, everyone raises them. They're an impressive breed of cattle, if not a unique one. Even if beef isn't specifically labeled Angus beef, it probably is anyway.

*   *   *

Burgers. I should really do burgers.

Summer and I are tiptoeing between the cars in our garage, arms loaded with bags from the supermarket, as our son walks ahead of us at a brisk two-year-old pace. Of course, this pace is painstakingly slow from a fully grown human perspective. Even more so when those humans have each arm loaded with forty pounds of groceries. But with both cars parked in our two-car garage, there's no room for us to pass him.

“Do you have anything in mind for dinner, Sum?”

“No, I haven't thought about it.” Then, to Dec, “Keep going, honey. These bags are heavy.”

“I thought I'd make burgers.”

Dec spies a particularly interesting pebble on the floor of the garage. Or maybe it's a mote of dust. He pauses to examine it, and the Grocery Train stops.

Summer sighs. “Honey, why didn't you tell me? I would have bought hamburger buns while we were at the store.”

“I wasn't thinking about making burgers when we were at the store. Do I need to go back?”

The Grocery Train starts moving again. “No, it's fine. I'll figure something out.”

“Sorry, Sum.”

“Don't worry about it.”

Declan reaches the back of the garage and the person-sized steel door that leads to the backyard. It doesn't shut all the way—I should fix that, maybe tomorrow—so he grabs the edge of the door and pulls. It swings open with a creak. Then it begins to swing shut.

“Honey, could you hold the door for Mom—”

“Buddy, the door … Don't let it—”

It slams back against the door frame with a loud clang, leaving Summer and me standing in a cramped garage, overburdened with two armfuls of groceries.

*   *   *

A few hours later, I'm standing in front of a small grill while two double handfuls of lump charcoal glow fiercely from beneath a coating of snowy-white ash. Lump charcoal is nothing more than pieces of hardwood heated to high temperatures without oxygen so they don't combust. The result is a wood-shaped block of almost pure carbon, which burns at temperatures much higher than the original wood. (Charcoal briquettes are made from sawdust by the same process and use chemical binders to form them into blocks.)

My charcoal is ready for cooking, so I slip back into the house. I've already divided one pound of ground beef into eight patties. On another counter, I cut some very sharp cheddar into slices about an eighth inch thick and an inch square.

I season the meat with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Then I place a square of cheese on top of four patties, then place another patty on top of those, crimping the edges of the meat. These quarter-pound burgers will be cheesed from the inside. Cheesed
sneakily.

“Those look good,” Summer says, drifting through the kitchen.

“Thanks. You get the bun situation figured out?”

“Yep! Look at the oven.” I turn and see a timer is set with only a few minutes left. Summer has been baking.

“Oh, nice! You made hamburger buns.”

“I made sharp cheddar hamburger buns.”

I look in the oven and see that she's shredded cheddar onto the top of the buns. It's turned a lovely golden brown. “Impressive.”

“Glad you think so.” She winks, then turns on her heel to leave.

Twenty minutes later, Summer and I bite into our burgers, while Declan noshes on their component parts. The burgers are simply seasoned, cooked medium, and earthy from the sharp cheddar both within the patty and atop the bun. It's an excellent, if simple, variation on this most American of dishes.

“These buns are silly good,” I tell Summer between mouthfuls. “Really lovely.”

“Burgers are nice, too,” she says. “The cheese inside is a nice touch.”

“Stealth cheese,” I offer. “Glad you like it.”

*   *   *

America, from Colonial times, inherited Britain's fondness for beef. No less a personage than Shakespeare commented on the British love of beef around 1599 on the plains of Agincourt in
Henry V
. In Victorian times, vegetables were incorrectly considered nutritionally deficient (it was thought that they would ferment in the stomach, as grass does in a cow's rumen), whereas grains were associated with the poor. Poultry and game were expensive, but beef was both accessible and retained a cultural history of vitality and yeoman pride.

When the first Aberdeen-Angus cattle arrived in the United States in 1873, they happened to arrive at a particularly formative time in U.S. history—the heyday of the cowboy and the romanticization of the West. At the time, America had a lot of open rangeland, most of it having been recently vacated by the nearly eradicated American buffalo. This landscape is an excellent habitat for large ungulates (e.g., hoofed mammals, such as buffalo), and cattle could thrive with minimal human intervention. The grass ocean of the Great Plains, then, provided a gigantic expanse of terrain ideal for raising cattle—and Americans raised a lot of them.

In Texas in the 1870s, longhorn cattle were the dominant breed. Semiferal holdovers of spectacularly horned taurine cattle brought to the New World during Spanish colonization, they roamed in enormous herds across the prairies. They were so numerous that cattlemen could just ride out onto the range and take them. There in rural Texas, however, a steer sold for three dollars. In the meat markets of Chicago, the same animal sold for forty.

This brings us to another major factor in Americans' love of beef—democratic meat distribution. In Europe at the time, because they lacked America's wide-open spaces, beef was largely funneled to and consumed by the aristocracy. In America, however, it could be purchased by anyone, regardless of class. All anyone needed was the opportunity.

This demand for beef in the city led to the development of the epic cattle drive. Getting those cattle from the frontier to city markets was a tremendous undertaking. Cowboys would guide enormous herds along the Chisholm Trail from the wilds of Texas to the nearest railway terminals in Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas. From there, they would be shipped to meat markets in Chicago and elsewhere.

These cowboys—romantic figures, alone on the prairie, pitting their wile and guts against an ambivalent yet savage nature—captured the imagination of a nation still reeling from the Civil War. Cowboy dime novels flew off the shelves. In 1883, the same year that the American Aberdeen-Angus Breeders' Association was founded, Buffalo Bill Cody first staged his Wild West show. It depicted an exotic, untamed West where a man could start anew. Where it didn't matter what kind of family he was born into or where he was during the still-recent Civil War. Cowboys lived by their own code and by their own rules—largely free of hierarchy, intrusive government, a moralizing church, or the limitations imposed by large cities. In this, they came to represent a new and uniquely American vision of what it means to be free.

In 1893, twenty years after George Grant arrived on the High Plains with his black Scottish bulls, historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented a paper at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In it, he argued that the unique situation of the American frontier was the crucible in which the essence of our democracy was forged. In adapting to the difficult and varied challenges of frontier life, Turner argued, useless or outdated European customs and thought patterns were burned away. Adaptation to the frontier transformed immigrants into Americans. The frontier was the scene of a democratizing process that enabled our unique experiment in government to thrive.

Turner presented his hypothesis at a significant time—census data published in 1890 had officially noted that scattered settlements throughout the West had erased any true geographic line denoting an end to U.S. occupation. Put another way, by the time Turner published his paper, the frontier had already vanished.

The West—and cowboys especially—carried a mystique. By some cultural osmosis, beef acquired some of this mystique itself: The cowboy can't exist without the cow. And to partake of a thick steak was to partake of a cultural experience both wild—as in Wild West—and celebratory of the unique abundance associated with the conquering of a “new” continent. To eat a steak was a reaffirmation of patriotism. Of Manifest Destiny—which revealed the High Plains upon which the new cattle empires thrived. Of America.

I grew up on those High Plains. The memory of those times is still palpable in the air there. It blows in with the dust, across the still-visible ruts the wagons made in the dirt of the Oregon Trail. You can feel it in Abilene, where the cattle climbed into boxcars bound for the great cities of the East.

The fate of cattle in those cities first came to light in Upton Sinclair's novel
The Jungle
. Published in 1906, it attempted to shed light on the plight of exploited immigrant labor working in Chicago's meatpacking industry. It described in grisly detail the most egregious of slaughterhouse abuses—dead rats poisoned by plant workers and swept into the pork sausage–making apparatus along with the poison that killed them, for example. Instead of focusing on the exploited immigrant laborers, however, the public focused on the revolting food safety practices. The uproar that the book caused led to the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Act, passed by Congress later that year. Sinclair would write in a 1906 article, “I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”