Siegel - Totally steak cookbook

S teak.

The mere mention of it is bound to get either your mouth watering or your blood boiling. No other food elicits the kind of intense emotional reaction that a sizzling slab of beef does.

Steak has ridden the roller coaster of America's love/hate affair with foodespecially fatty foodswith a vengeance. In the last fifty years alone it has gone from being the mainstay of the American diet and the celebratory food par excellencedad barbecuing a giant porterhouse on the patio was the epitome of the 1950s good lifeto being viewed as a dangerous substance, feared and reviled by many as the enemy.

During the last ten years, the great American steak dinner has been held responsible for a host of ills, from high cholesterol to the expanding national waistline and overactive toddlers. For a while there it seemed that everything bad could be blamed on a slab of meat.

The good thing about food as fashion though, is that the pendulum swings both ways. And these days, it seems to be swinging toward beef. After all, how could something that tastes and smells so good, and that we crave so intensely, be all that bad?

Now that steak is staging a comeback, I for one, am hoping my fellow Americans don't go overboard. When the mood strikes, why not buy a terrific cut of meat, consider the right way to prepare it, cook it to perfectionthe recipe for T-bone Steak Smothered in Onions on page 84 is as good a place as any to startand savor every bite? Why not eat a great steak once a week or once a month, rather than every day or not at all?

That way, maybe steak can take its rightful place in the pantheon of truly great American ingredients, without disappearing in another ten years like last year's fashion victim.

However much we may fancy our avocados and Swiss chard, our sprouts and snap beans and sweet potatoes, from a purely nutritional point of view they can't hold a candle to a nice hunk of meat.

from Elizabeth Rozin's The Primal Cheeseburger

STEAK SALADS, SOUPS, AND SANDWICHES