No Irish Catholic boy ever loved his mother more than I did. She died several years back and I still miss her.
So it’s rare I make any disparaging comments where mom is concerned. But I’m going to today.
She didn’t have many faults, but she did have one: she couldn’t cook a steak to save her life.
I only hope the poor cows who gave their lives providing meat to my family never looked down from Cow Heaven to see what had become of their earthly remains. It would only depress them.
The beef that went into my mother’s frying pan looked pretty much like any other. What came out of that pan was better suited to the manufacture of uncomfortable dress shoes than eating.
Part of the problem was my old man. He liked his meat incinerated to the point it could no longer really be called meat. What made it to our family table more closely resembled something an archaeologist might unearth than anything food-related.
As a kid, I didn’t know any better. I assumed steak was what people who couldn’t afford good food ate. Steak was served in prison — or so I imagined — to inmates guilty of particularly heinous infractions. It was the main reason I never shoplifted comic books.
Then one day…
We were at my Aunt Madeline’s house, a Labor Day barbecue. She asked a question that changed my life forever.
“How do you want your steak, Mikey?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. How did I want my steak? Well, in a lead-lined, sealed container on a bullet train headed for Tokyo would be nice.
“How do I want it?” I said.
“Do you want it well done, medium, rare?” she replied.
I was only nine year old, but rare sounded good. If something was rare, I figured, it was more valuable, right? Surely the same applied to steak. I ordered mine rare.
My mother stepped in. “Oh, no, Mike always has his steaks well done,” she said.
“No, I want rare,” I said, mostly to contradict my mother, something I was getting good at even at age nine.
Five minutes later, my Aunt Madeline dropped a steak onto my paper plate. It looked like absolutely nothing my mother had ever given me. It was juicy. It was pink. It was — gack! — bleeding all over my paper plate!
Just the sight of it made me slightly nauseous. But I was determined to prove my mom wrong and appear grown up.
I cut a minuscule slice from the most cooked section and forked it tentatively into my mouth.
Suddenly, I could hear angels singing! Bells ringing! Millions of years of carnivorous evolution asserted themselves as I dug into that steak with an avidity generally seen only in packs of ravenous hyenas.
It was the beginning of a love affair that has endured five decades.
In preparation for Labor Day, tonight I will lovingly insert two beautiful inch-thick sirloins into a bath of Lori’s secret (and beyond sublime) marinade, where they will absorb all that is good in life until Saturday afternoon, when I will nestle them onto the grill — briefly — before allowing them to transport me to my own private gastronomical Nirvana.
When I was a kid, chocking back my mom’s burned-to-a-cinder steak, she always provided milk or Kool-Aid with which to wash it down.
Then one day, shortly after my 19th birthday, someone handed me a frosty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. But that’s a story for another time.
mtaylor@staffordgroup.com
(616) 548-8273
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