Secret Ingredients Read Free Page A

the hall and supervise the kitchen. He is extremely proud of the meat he cuts and likes to make sure it is cooked properly. He succeeded old “Beefsteak Tom” McGowan as the East Side’s most important beefsteak functionary. Mr. McGowan was a foreman in the Department of Water Supply who arranged beefsteaks as a hobby. He was an obscure person, but in 1924 his hearse was followed by more than a thousand sorrowful members of Tammany clubs.
    Mr. Wertheimer had almost finished cutting the meat for a beefsteak the last time I went to see him. Approximately 350 men and women were expected that night, and he had carved steaks off 35 steer shells and had cut up 450 double-rib lamb chops. In his icebox, 450 lamb kidneys were soaking in a wooden tub. The steaks and chops were piled up in baskets, ready to be delivered to the uptown hall in which the beefsteak was to be thrown. (Technically, a beefsteak is never “given” or “held” it is “thrown” or “run.”) Mr. Wertheimer, a pink-cheeked, well-nourished man, looked proudly at the abundantly loaded baskets and said, “The foundation of a good beefsteak is an overflowing amount of meat and beer. The tickets usually cost five bucks, and the rule is ‘All you can hold for five bucks.’ If you’re able to hold a little more when you start home, you haven’t been to a beefsteak, you’ve been to a banquet that they called a beefsteak.”
    Classical beefsteak meat is carved off the shell, a section of the hindquarter of a steer; it is called “short loin without the fillet.” To order a cut of it, a housewife would ask for a thick Delmonico. “You don’t always get it at a beefsteak,” Mr. Wertheimer said. “Sometimes they give you bull fillets. They’re no good. Not enough juice in them, and they cook out black.” While I watched, Mr. Wertheimer took a shell off a hook in his icebox and laid it on a big, maple block. It had been hung for eight weeks and was blanketed with blue mold. The mold was an inch thick. He cut off the mold. Then he boned the shell and cut it into six chunks. Then he sliced off all the fat. Little strips of lean ran through the discarded fat, and he deftly carved them out and made a mound of them on the block. “These trimmings, along with the tails of the steaks, will be ground up and served as appetizers,” he said. “We’ll use four hundred tonight. People call them hamburgers, and that’s an insult. Sometimes they’re laid on top of a slice of Bermuda onion and served on bread.” When he finished with the shell, six huge steaks, boneless and fatless, averaging three inches thick and ten inches long, lay on the block. They made a beautiful still life. “After they’ve been broiled, the steaks are sliced up, and each steak makes about ten slices,” he said. “The slices are what you get at a beefsteak.” Mr. Wertheimer said the baskets of meat he had prepared would be used that night at a beefsteak in the Odd Fellows’ Hall on East 106th Street; the Republican Club of the Twentieth A.D. was running it. He invited me to go along.
    “How’s your appetite?” he asked.
    I said there was nothing wrong with it.
    “I hope not,” he said. “When you go to a beefsteak, you got to figure on eating until it comes out of your ears. Otherwise it would be bad manners.”
             
    That night I rode up to Odd Fellows’ Hall with Mr. Wertheimer, and on the way I asked him to describe a pre-Prohibition stag beefsteak.
    “Oh, they were amazing functions,” he said. “The men wore butcher aprons and chef hats. They used the skirt of the apron to wipe the grease off their faces. Napkins were not allowed. The name of the organization that was running the beefsteak would be printed across the bib, and the men took the aprons home for souvenirs. We still wear aprons, but now they’re rented from linen-supply houses. They have numbers on them, and you turn them in at the hat-check table when you get your hat and coat. Sometimes