no. 124: diane

This morning I rolled out of bed declaring that I was off to make the dogs some Steak Diane, but neither D – for whom this dish is surely named – nor I could remember what the hell Steak Diane actually was. I use the past tense because whatever else Steak Diane might be, it’s certainly “Continental cuisine,” the kind that’s embarrassed itself into extinction in the global cities of the globe (which just makes it ripe for revival).

My inability to remember a recipe I never learned was not the only reason the beasts didn’t get steak for breakfast, but if I were to make good on my promise, this is what I would have done:

I would have taken a piece of boneless sirloin or filet, and pounded it fairly thin, a bit more than a centimeter, certainly less than two.

I’d have seared the steak in melted butter in a pan, then deglazed the pan with Worcestershire sauce and poured the pan sauce over the steak, garnishing with chopped parsley. The dogs would’ve tried to pick off the parsley.

If this doesn’t sound right, it’s probably because you’re more familiar with the New Yorquino incarnation, which adds, depending on who you believe, mustard, chives, lemon juice, sherry, madeira or brandy, and most importantly a guy in a white tuxedo to cook and flambé tableside. This is Kennedy-era stuff, Julia Child on TV and Jacques Pepin still in the kitchen, when a maître d’hotel could go around calling himself “Nino of the Drake” and get an obit in the New York Times.

The steak had to be pounded thin to make this work. You had to start with raw meat because to make the sauce you need the fond in the pan, and you couldn’t send out a schmutzed-up pan for the tuxedo to ignite (the schmutz is essential, go figure). I wonder how long it took to teach someone to cook this on a spirit burner on a cart. Thin steaks are in a way more forgiving. Send one out pre-salted and room temp, and you can be fairly sure that once they’re lightly browned and lit on fire, even a first-timer will have something that looks acceptably pink, at least to someone who’s had two martinis. The browning has to be light. Giving the steak a proper crust is a messier process than you can accomplish in a white tuxedo, and it’ll smoke up the whole dining room, though maybe in the 60s that didn’t matter.

If this also sounds unfamiliar, you’re thinking of the modern Steak Diane, with cream and mushrooms in the sauce. No one quite knows who to blame for this one, which feels even more deracinated than “Continental cuisine.” You can find recipes that don’t pound the steak thin, or skip the Worcestershire. If nothing’s sacred, nothing’s profane. I remember eating something like this the one time I went to Jack’s Place, a Singaporean institution whose closest cultural equivalent in the US might be Panda Express, an outpost of some faraway and indeterminate land. I’m sure it was called a “steak with mushroom sauce,” since nobody knew who Diane was and they didn’t have the French to call it steak a la can.

At one point something at the restaurant demanded most of a gallon of Worcestershire. The dregs graced our pantry for a couple years after, so it’s quite possible that I’ve actually made Steak Diane. And even if I’ve never put steak and Worcestershire on the same plate, a new Steak Diane seems to roll round every thirty years or so, so maybe it’s D’s turn.

I must have cooked my first steak at the age of 10 or so, fucking around while my parents were grilling. I accidentally used the “human rotisserie” technique, flipping a thin cut sirloin like I was trying to make it come up heads. It came out some kind of pink in the middle, Uncle James said it was the best he’d ever had.

If you count from that one forward, it took me 22 years to learn to cook a steak properly. That or six months with Jared on the line. By “properly” I don’t mean hitting medium rare at will. I mean doing so without a thermometer or a circulator, just a cake tester and my lip and a pan, the way that left me awestruck when I first saw it done. This is part of why I cook – to just do things that felt wondrous once. From now until decrepitude, and possibly some way beyond, I can just do this, a small superpower to share with everyone I love. With strangers, colleagues, passersby. I’ve been thinking about this recently, for the same reason we all have, now that everyone’s disposable.

I used to think cooks were too cheap to bother automating, but now we have burger flipping arms and automatic woks, whole robot salad bowl restaurants with human prep cooks scrambling in the back, feeding the machines. I think about toil, about hours, whole lives spent grinding and chopping, cooking steaks, standing by a fryer. Maybe we should automate it all away.

Someone told me about predictive thermometers the other day. You stick one in a roast and it tells you when it will be done, Minority Report for meat. I used to cook all the meat with an immersion circulator; and now I know I did that out of fear, idiot-proofing it from myself. But if I had to send out a dining room’s worth of Steak Diane for servers to flambé, I’d probably pull the circulator out again, sous-vide fist-shaped filets, so they still looked mostly raw.

Style is a sine wave, flambé carts are back, but thin steaks are out of style, they don’t look as meaty on camera. It takes a while to cook a thick filet properly, and even longer to teach someone to do it. They don’t train flambéurs anymore, because who has time to do so? At some point self-driving, self-flambéing service carts will be all the rage, and then the millwheel of fashion will turn again, and we’ll all be flambéurs, because nothing entertains like a human being.

If you’ve read this far, please take a split second to stab that little heart at the bottom of this post, it actually helps. The magic of our algorithmic overlords is puissant! All hail!