IT'S F***ING RAW!: EP.1 Steak Tartare

Some might say that the best things to come out of France, alongside: Charles Baudelaire, guillotine and the metric system is steak tartar, however, the history of it is far more convoluted. 

The idea of eating raw meat possibly came to France in 18th century from Russia, after they were so impressed with Peter’s the Great unrivaled ability to kick Swedish ass that they decided to start diplomatic relations with Russia and become besties ever since… (at least until the invention of guillotines, after that it never really picked up again). Indeed, steak tartare sounds a lot more eastern-European when you describe it as “raw meat and pickles”. However, it might be the case that the French have only picked up the recipe in 1812, while marching out of very cold and miserable Russia, with nothing better to sustain them than raw horse meat and the thought of what they will do to Napoleon once they get back. Yet horse meat has only become popular in France in 1870s, when the wars finally started taking their toll on supplies of cattle and France kinda ran out of cows for a while. 

But here my Russian friends, all 2 of them, might be tempted to start writing angry comments such as: “I lived in Russia all my life and never had raw horse-meat, so no way tartar stated here”. Well, to be honest, neither have I, but it is probably because a lot of culture was lost and changed during the Soviet times, besides cows are more efficient than horses as far as farm animals go, so it makes sense why horse-tartare hasn’t been a part of Russian diet for more than 100 years. But even if it was, it is still not truly from Russia, but most likely comes from Mongolia. 

Now here the history gets pretty weird. So Mongolians didn’t actually eat horse meat, they just used to put slices of raw horse meat under their saddles while riding, believing that it had healing properties … because we are about 600 years away from any real medicine here. Meanwhile, European travelers, who walked the Great Khan’s silk road recorded what they saw in the far east didn’t quite get the totally reasonable Mongolian logic of “raw horse meat = medicine for horses back “and thought that the Mongols just kept the meat as a snack for later. Interestingly enough, Roman Catholic Church banned the consumption of horse meat in the middle ages (I am sure they had a good reason), so maybe the tales of the travelers existed more as a smear campaign to paint Mongolians as barbarians. Still, the idea remained and quite possibly inspired Europeans to try what they thought was an exotic Asian dish with more local ingredients.

Anyway, enough about raw meat, and more about the “tartare” part. So, even though there might be a slim chance that “tartare” is named after the Tatar people (Mongolians, but more Russo-Turkic), its actually just the name for the sauce, which was pretty popular in France through the 19th century, it has even been mentioned in Duma’s “Count Monte Cristo”. Everything that had tartare sauce on the side was called “a la tartare”, until one day in 1921, Auguste Escoffier (a Frenchman who was referred to as the “king of chefs and chef of kings”) slapped some tartare sauce on raw diced beef and instead the following the usual “a la” convention decided to really confuse food-historians and call his dish “Beefsteack à l'Americaine", making people think that it actually came from America… but it didn’t.

In Texas, you can find a dish called “Parisa”, more commonly referred to as “tiger meat”, which is a mix of raw red meats, onion and cheese, which was brought over and re-invented by Alsatian immigrants in 1800s. You can actually still buy some of the mix at butchers in Castroville (hopefully its not the left-overs from 1800s).

So in short: steak tartare probably started off as raw-horse meat and was brought to France from either Russia or Mongolia, in either 18th or 13th century, respectably (probably a bit of both), where it was swapped out for beef and didn’t really kick off that much. However, some French immigrants brought the idea of raw meat with them to America in 1800s where it became popular enough for the great French chef to call his raw-beef dish “à l'Americaine”. The dish was however served with tartare sauce and anything with it was called “a la tartare”, hence why we call it that today.

Today, tartare is made mostly from beef and there is not much left from the title sauce except the use of capers and the name itself. Most modern interpretations use egg-yolk on top instead. I am not sure where this started from, but the earliest recipe with egg-yolk I could find is from 1938 publication of Larousse Gastronomique. The dish has really picked up only after 1950s, cos you know… people in Europe were a bit occupied with killing each other before then, but it has been very popular in French-cousin ever since Tour de France has become a thing (1955).

Indeed, thetl recipe I used is from The St James Restaurant that opened in 1955 and is now published in Fortum and Mason cookbook. The only change I made was sub in “moutarde verte a l'estragon” instead of half of Dijon mustard and used both tobacco and Worcestershire sauce like the French used guillotines in 1789… rather liberally.