Few things, it seems, are likely to cause more social outrage than an overcooked steak and Donald Trump. So it was inevitable the current POTUS’s preference for a well-done rib-eye was greeted with derision.
The subtext of much of the criticism was that to demand your meat cooked all the way through is both ignorant and unsophisticated – it’s impossible to avoid the class issue here. Indeed, a recent survey found a strong correlation between level of education and taste for rare meat in the US population.
But is there ever a defence for a well-done steak? You would be hard pushed to find a chef with a kind word to say about well-done meat – Gordon Ramsay famously claimed that even good-quality steak “has gone past any form of taste” when it is well done. Will Beckett, co-owner of steak chain Hawksmoor, strikes a more conciliatory note. “None of us feels so strongly about it that we’d tell a customer he can’t have it. As it happens, my father-in-law likes well-done steak with ketchup,” he says. “Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that none of us would ever eat it that way ourselves.”
When I ask my acquaintances, few admit to preferring their steaks à la Donald, although they outed many elderly relatives (“My mum, but she’s no longer around to tell us why”). Among those who do favour well-done steak, a fear of blood was cited (a misconception: those pink juices are actually water and protein), as well as lingering trauma after a bout of food poisoning. And for one respondent, the unpalatable memory of an emergency Heimlich manoeuvre in a restaurant (well-done meat may be chewy, but it doesn’t tend to lodge in the throat in quite the same way as rare).
There are other good reasons for it too – pregnant women, the very young and the very old, who are more vulnerable to serious food poisoning, are advised to avoid meat that hasn’t been cooked through, and some airlines won’t cook steak anything less than medium because they have clearly watched Airplane!.
What there isn’t, really, is any justification on the grounds of taste. The flavour in steak is almost all in the charred outer surface, so a properly cooked rare steak ought to have as much of it as an incinerated one, though the high heat at which steaks are cooked means the well-done one will be an awful lot dryer – hence the “buckets” of accompanying ketchup Trump dumped on top, perhaps. But frankly, if this is the worst crime the president commits in the next four years, I won’t begrudge him a single burned mouthful.
Felicity Cloake
