My philosophy is, don’t order steak in restaurants unless it’s a very extraordinary restaurant and the meat is at least prime grade. That’s because I’m thoroughly convinced most folks can learn to prepare steaks as well as any restaurant chef – it’s just not that difficult, really. If you don’t already know how to do it, then go to the Safeway or whatever, buy some USDA choice steaks of various cut and thickness, and practice on those. What you will find is that you can fix a steak at home that’s far superior to what you get at places like Outback, or even, I bet, your local prestige chop house. And the reason proves to be quite simple – you will be cooking up a decidedly better grade of beef than they do, and, the simple fact is, it’s the grade, cut and aging that determine a steak’s quality. It’s sort of like gourmet cheese, actually. Once you’ve purchased a piece and brought it home, there’s not much you can do to improve it. Somebody else (or, most likely, quite a few rather skilled people) have already done all of the work. The only difference with a steak is that you have to broil it, and broiling is just about matching the cut and thickness with the distance from the fire and how long you expose each side to the heat. In truth, sixth grade science projects are vastly more complicated.
Don’t worry about whether you’re broiling the steak on a grill outside with mesquite or in the kitchen oven – heat is heat. Sure, you’ll want to dress up your prime beef steaks when you cook them on the deck with a grill, but you can easily perfect your technique inside.
And I practice what I preach, for sure. May Day was duly celebrated with a big pile of USDA prime top loin Delmonico steaks, grilled over Vermont maple and Kentucky hickory charcoal sprinkled with upstate New York apple wood chips that I soaked overnight in Gentleman Jack. In addition, there were grass-fed organic Colorado bison burgers for the younger children, who aren’t quite ready to tackle a prime steak yet. Because yes, as the astute and regular reader of this Web log has no doubt quickly guessed, once extended an invitation to attend a May Day cookout at my home in Great Falls, Virginia, my dear sister Rose quickly made sure I would provide for not only her husband Hank and all their kids, but that I, of course, had also meant to invite Hank’s brother’s family, which, again, as regular readers know, shares a house in Fairfax with Rose and Hank, and includes a couple more offspring than even they, with their own truly remarkable conservative Catholic fecundity, have manage to produce. I must say that, as usual at our family holiday festivities, my brother Rob Roy, his wife Katje and their only child, Jason, looked rather lost in the crowd.
The weather cooperated admirably. One could not have wished for a better day for a cookout – no rain, perfect temperature, and not a single flying insect in sight, either. Now, I know from previous experience that my cookouts usually attract neighbors, which, considering what grilled prime beef smells like, is hardly surprising. And so, when the aerospace corporation vice president, home alone with work he cannot leave while his wife is away visiting her family, carrying a bottle of moderately good scotch as his contribution to the festivities; the married couple of anesthesiologists, wearing their usual oddly beaming expressions and reeking of expensive weed, mad with the munchies, bearing a slightly bizarre salad, obviously concocted in jig time from whatever they could find; and the K Street lobbyist – who brought nothing but a glum look – arrived, I was prepared. Each neighbor got their own steak, grilled exactly to their specifications. Hell, I’ve still got three steaks left. I guess I’ll age them a few more days and stage a repeat performance later in the week for Cerise and me, then have the last one with a duck egg, shallot and chanterelle omelette for breakfast next weekend. Or perhaps I’ll get to use morels instead. Morel season’s supposed to come early this year; so maybe I’ll get lucky.
Things went pretty near perfectly, until, around nine-thirty, well after Rose and her sister-in-law had packed their huge, rambunctious broods and reluctant husbands into the three SUVs and a minivan it took to carry them all back to that house in Fairfax, while Cerise and Katje were making girl talk in the living room, the two stoned doctors zoned out in my deck hot-tub, and Rob played xBox with Jason and the executive on the giant screen HDTV in the basement, Bartleby, the unhappy lobbyist, sat down next to me on the deck and snatched a bottle of Dogfish Head Immort Ale out of the cooler. It was his fourth, or at least, the fourth I’d seen him drink since he arrived. That stuff, by the way, is eleven percent alcohol. It showed.
“Tom,” he slurred, opening his ale and holding the bottle aloft in a woozy salute, “here’s to a gentleman who knows how to cook a [expletive] steak dinner!”
“Thanks,” I replied in my most modest tone. “But you’d better slow down, or you’ll be fertilizing my rhododendrons with it.”
“Yeah,” he burped, throwing his bottle a rueful gaze. “It’s been… really… rough… this week.”
“How so?” I enquired.
“My biggest account,” he confided, “is British Petroleum.”
“In that case,” I concurred, “no doubt it really was a rough week, what with the Deepwater Horizon petroleum platform exploding like a cheap firecracker all over the Gulf of Mexico…”
“And the entire rig going up in a blaze and sinking,” he wailed.
“Followed,” I added, “by what looks to be at least the second largest oil spill in history…”
“And my best client,” Bartleby moaned, “losing twenty-five billion dollars of capitalization in a matter of days…”
“Not to mention,” I reminded, “the perfect wind and water conditions to plow all that oil right into the most sensitive type of ecosystem; one which supplies nearly half the seafood consumed in the United States, and provides for the survival of over three hundred economically valuable, threatened or endangered species…”
“And everybody and his dog everywhere on the Gulf Coast,” Bartleby choked out, “suing the pants off BP, Transocean, and Halliburton;” he complained, “plus anyone who might have given them the time of day lately, like Cameron International and Lloyds of London. Can you believe it? Over thirty-five lawsuits filed since the accident! Thousands of plaintiffs – fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers, crabbers, homeowners associations, charter boat captains, tourist agencies, yacht clubs, nature clubs, surfing clubs, for Christ’s sake; the states of Texas, Misssissippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida; plus every hick Southern county and town with so much as ten feet of shore line, from Galveston to Panama City!”
“You realize, of course,” I casually remarked, “that if the oil gets to the Gulf Coast, it’s going to be one hell of a lot harder to clean up than the oil from the Exxon Valdez.”
Bartleby’s hand stopped halfway to his mouth, the bottle poised mid-air. “Uh, no, I didn’t. How come?”
“Because,” I pointed out, “Prince William Sound has a rocky Alaskan arctic shore, where the oil can just be blasted off. Not that it has recovered completely from the oil spill there, of course, not even twenty-one years later. But the situation on the Gulf Coast is much more likely to be similar to what happened when the Amoco Cadiz ran aground off the coast of Brittany, back in 1978. Those coastal French marshes are a lot more like what the oil from the BP spill could hit – a soft, spongy mud estuarine labyrinth, intermingled with thick mats of vegetation and grass roots; with extremely gentle tidal flushing action. When stuff like that gets oiled, you might as well forget about it. Oysters from those Brittany marshes still taste like a gas station today, a generation later. It could be a century before the petroleum contaminant levels fall below the level of perception; even then, they might not be safe to eat. Just because you can’t taste carcinogenic petroleum chemicals doesn’t mean they aren’t there…”
“[Expletive]!” Bartleby shouted in dismay. “[Expletive]! [Expletive]! [Expletive]!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked cautiously.
“A [expletive] century?” Bartleby exclaimed. “Holy [expletive] Mother of [expletive] God Almighty!”
“Well, yes,” I agreed, “it’s bound to be pretty upsetting when you think about it. No doubt there are plenty of… what was that list again? Oh, yes, fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers, crabbers, homeowner associations, charter boat captains…”
“[Expletive!]”
“… and so forth, who are, at this very moment, expressing pretty much the same sentiments as you. But their businesses, jobs, culture and way of life depend on the Gulf Coast ecology. You, on the other hand, are a K Street lobbyist, whose circumstances, I assume, will not be highly impacted. So why on earth…”
“Because I [expletive] did it!” Bartleby distraughtly confessed. “Me!”
“Huh?” I responded, being at what, anyone who knows me will attest, was a rare loss for words.
“BP came to me,” Bartleby sobbed, “[expletive] about how [expletive] expensive it is for them to comply with deep water blowout prevention regulations in the European Union; and could I do something to get them out of that problem here in the United States?”
“Which,” I presumed, “you did?”
“For about eight hundred thousand bucks,” Bartleby divulged. “I did a targeted campaign contribution analysis for the key votes in the House and Senate, so BP could tell who knows which side their bread is buttered on. With that, if the measure ever even got to the floor of either chamber, BP would have the swing votes to crush it, right there in their back pocket. Then I saw to it that all the necessary… collateral situations were… implemented with the appropriate Congressional committee members…”
“Such as?” I queried in my best innocent voice.
“Ah,” he spat, “the usual – call girls, call boys, bags of money, bags of blow, appointments with… erotic specialists of various kinds, insider trading tips from BP’s back room, provision of various advantages for…”
“Right,” I broke in, not really needing to hear any more. “You did your job as a K Street lobbyist, just like all the other ones here in Washington.”
“Really?” Bartleby murmured, brightening slightly. “So you don’t think I’m some kind of disgusting, greedy, dishonest, amoral monster?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I told him as I dodged the question. “It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. That’s how the system works. BP hired you to get them out of having to observe expensive blowout prevention safety procedures, and that’s what you did.”
“But what,” Bartleby fretted, “about the shrimp, the fish, the crabs and the oysters? What about the gators and the manatees? What about all those cute, furry little critters and those millions and millions of beautiful birds?”
“It’s their responsibility,” I explained, “to hire their own lobbyist and pay them eight hundred grand to try and stop you. It’s as simple as that – a fair and balanced tradition of exerting sub-rosa influence on the American government that’s been a tried and true process since the redcoats chased James Madison out of the White House. Besides,” I elaborated, “you were just one single instrument of British Petroleum’s perfidious avarice. Not a pawn in their game, to be sure, but no bishop either – a knight, perhaps. Think about it – there are so many other pieces on the board – the multinational that operated the drilling rig; the company that supplied the cheaper, less effective blowout protection equipment BP was allowed to buy because of lax US regulations; the corporation that installed the blowout protection equipment; the lazy, incompetent federal government employees who didn’t have a clue; the crooked state officials who looked the other way; the corrupt senators and representatives who solicited your bribes and favors; so Bartleby, my friend, quit beating yourself up over your client’s massive hypocritical villainy. Believe me, there’s more than enough blame to go around!”
Bartleby considered my advice for a moment, then smiled. “Yeah, Tom, now that you mention it, I guess there is.”