Juicy Post: Deciphering Meat

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 Of Marriage & Menus

We have a divided marriage, one of us craves beef, lamb, and pork (in that order, with the predominant player being beef)  and the other would so much rather eat seafood – crustaceans, fish,  cephalopods like octopus or squid, spiny creatures such as sea urchins- but not especially raw oysters. When we lived in Virginia, just outside of Washington DC, purchasing good quality beef was easy, especially if you wanted a high-priced steak cut, prime ribs, or one of several grades of hamburger. Yet a good seafood purveyor was hard to find. I am compelled to admit that the beefmonger was right — often my pescatarian choices were just on the border of being “off” or their previously frozen state had rendered them unappetizing, except for an occasional jumbo shrimp cocktail. 

Where’s the Beef?

Over the half century that I have been buying meat, I have noticed that so much of the steer is not offered in the US.  Different pot roast cuts (blade chuck or bone-in chuck)  of my mother’s generation are hard to find.   One of my personal favorites, beef marrow bones, is even more difficult, but not impossible to ask for.  Should you be so lucky to find them at a butcher counter, do try Fergus Henderson’s recipe for roasted marrow bones with parsley salad – the recipe is in one of the most downloaded posts of the KD archives. 

Other than the required USDA certifications of Prime, Choice, Standard or Utility, there is no other real categorization for beef. Supermarkets generally don’t  offer pork in any way other than adult. Offal, like calves liver, beef tongue,  veal kidneys,  and beef heart – they have disappeared.  I often wonder where they end up, as it seems like such a waste not to see them for sale. In fact, the best hamburger meat I ever had was from Charlie Fincham, a somewhat gruff in-appearance butcher  at DC’s Eastern Market who was a pushover with his customers. His secret was a certain percentage of ground beef heart in the mix. He also introduced me to hanger steaks, well before they became a trend  in supermarket meat counters.

Change Of Venue

In Bologna, sloughing off seafood is more difficult for the beefmonger. We have Scampo just around the corner,  which offers a small selection of pristine and previously trimmed seafood, which, if you are truly in a hurry or just lazy, they will cook for you to take home. The famously famous Quadrilatero also has two really stellar fishmongers – including one who always has a crate of blue crabs which are an invasive menace in the Adriatic sea. They still have not figured out that the best way to sell it is to clean and pick the crabmeat  so that 500 grams (a bit over a pound) would easily be sold for 40 euros or more. I am still tempted to show them the light, along with a few recipes for crab cakes. As for selecting seafood, it’s pretty straightforward, the nomenclature might be different, but a trout here looks like a trout at home. If there is a fish you don’t recognize and you want to know what to do with it, Giallo Zafferano is your friend.  

Not so with meat. First of all in the US, we have beef, with a teeny bit of indeterminate veal on the side. The beef must have a USDA certification.  While both lamb and pork have to be certified to be free from disease, quality certification from the USDA is voluntary, and many sheep and hog processors do not want to participate. I should add that real “spring lamb” should be about  5 months old. Lamb in the US  is really almost mutton – 2 or 3 years old.

 In fact once, I went to The Organic Butcher in McLean, Virginia (and even after this incident, I remained a customer) and pre-ordered a 4lb leg of spring lamb. When I went to pick it up, I was handed a 7.5 pound teenage lamb thigh. I told the man at the counter there was a mistake, that I had wanted a leg of lamb between four and five lbs. He took it back, sawed off a piece, weighed it and handed it back to me with an adjusted label for a 4lb leg of lamb. In reality, the last time I was able to buy spring lamb was at the now-defunct French Market in Georgetown, which closed in 1995 (although the three Jacob brothers continued to share their butchering talents at other venues).

Too Many Choices

So now, with trials and lots of errors, I am slowly  decoding meat cuts in Bologna. In the US, meat from a steer – the term for a castrated bull that is raised for beef production – appears in a limited variety of cuts. The universal reasoning behind castration is that it makes the meat flavorful and tender (due to better marbling) and of course steers are less aggressive and can’t willy-nilly impregnate the females. A steer that grows beyond slaughtering age (2-3 years) is an ox. You rarely see ox meat for sale in the US – oxtails are usually from steers. Meat will also be scored from a heifer – a term used for a female cow which has not delivered a calf – although in the US, a cow which has delivered only one calf is usually allowed in this category, but the difference between steers and heifers is not marked at the meat counter.

Now about the touchy subject of veal or  meat from calves. Veal is mostly from male calves and the palest veal comes from calves that are primarily fed from cow’s milk. So the darker veal indicates an older calf and a change in diet. The EU has much stricter regulations in the raising of cattle and their calves than exist currently in the US. The crating of calves for the entirety of their  brief lives is not federally prohibited in the US but instead left to state legislatures to devise regulations. So far only nine states prohibit crating – Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, and Rhode Island. 

While in the US, there is certainly an outpouring of criticism to Concentrated Animal Feeding Opertions, or CAFOs, which includes the crating of calves, there exists no national ban on what is euphemistically called “intensive farming systems.” But there are some very strong groups, primarily among organic and regenerative agriculture farming communities, who are committed to humane and healthy cattle production, and the increased number of venues for purchasing their meat in the US is happily increasing.

  Crating, however, has been banned in the EU since  2006. Along with much stricter  feed and care regulations. EU members adhere to a new classification system for veal and beef. Since 2008, veal is classified as meat from calves up to the age of 12 months. Meat from cattle from one year and older is beef. Within that classification, though, meat from a calf  8 months and younger is labeled Class V and  8 months to 12 months is labeled Class Z.

That explained one mystery to me as I stared at the meat counters in Bologna. Class V meat is vitello or vitellino and Class Z is vitellone. Vitello is more tender, lighter in color, and considered more digestible than vitellone. Any cut with the appellation of Sorana means that it comes from a female cow older than a year. You’ll also see the term Scottona, which means that the cut is from a cow that has never calved and thus has a hormone condition that promotes fat storage, yielding tender, high quality meat. 

 The term manzo is used for beef cuts that are from a castrated male cow with an age of three to four years. When you see the term bue in Italian butcher shops, it will mean the cut was from a castrated male cow older than four years. Sometimes you will see the term Fassona, which means that a particular cut of beef is from a highly regarded Piedmontese breed of cattle.This breed is fed primarily on grain and a variety of hays, which in turn produces a meat that is low in cholesterol and connective tissue with a distinctive deep red color.  It has become a Slow Food product recently.

I have also seen Manzzetta Prussiana, or Scottana Prussiana in some butcher shops. It is not a breed of cattle, but rather a selection of beef from the western Polish province of Masuria. The various breeds there that qualify for this label are fed a diet high in sugar beet so that the meat actually has a savory/sweet taste and, of course, sears really well due to the natural sugar content. 

 Even though the official Italian language was extracted from the Tuscan dialect used by Dante Alighieri in his literary output,  local expressions for meat cuts are alive and well, and below I have attached a very helpful spreadsheet from GrillExperience.it  that gives you the regional names of many Italian meat cuts and their relation to American butchery.  This spreadsheet is very handy if you are in a vacation rental anywhere in Italy and want to enjoy the produce and meat markets available to you. Or you could just eat more fish.

Nancy Pollard

Kitchen Detail shares under the radar recipes, explores the art of cooking, the stories behind food, and the tools that bring it all together, while uncovering the social, political, and environmental truths that shape our culinary world.