table talk / By Hank Sims

Home Cooking

(April 19, 2007)  The actors, the characters and the plot are all long forgotten, but there’s one scene of a movie that has stuck with me. A man - a chef, or at least a good cook - is world-weary and physically exhausted, but hungry. He goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a steak. He takes out a frying pan and a little bit of oil, and in a few minutes fries the steak to perfection. He slips the steak to a plate, sits down at a table and eats it. Alone.

This scene flashes back to my memory to remind me that I have never been a good cook. I have my tiny repertoire of dishes that I can pull off with some degree of credibility, but the basic alchemy of the art has always escaped me. That guy with the steak knew his business. The heat reacts with the steak in precisely this way. You cook it this much and no more. When applied to the carnal joys of a good meal, that cold-blooded suavity of technique is damned appealing. In skilled hands, a plain, unadulterated cut of meat becomes a feast for the ages.

Photo by Hank Sims.

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As I said, I have my little repertoire - casseroles, stir fries, salads of various sorts. My wife and I have been together 10 years, and for almost all that time she has been a fairly strict ovo-lacto vegetarian. Before I met her, I lived almost exclusively on takeout burritos. Since I met her, I have been encouraged to try my hand at the stove. I’ve acquired some facility, but I have never made any headway on meats. The few attempts I have made over the years have been, almost without exception, unmitigated failures. Once, having scoured the recipe books for that movie chef’s secret, I attempted a stovetop steak for my grandmother. It is a measure of her love for me that she managed to eat nearly half of it. I myself had difficulty slicing the thing, even with strong arms and a sharp knife.

My family left town for a few days last week, and, as it often does when there are no vegetarians in the house, the scene from that forgotten movie came back to me. I resolved to make another effort.

So on my way home from work I made a stop at Myrtle Avenue Market, which is not too far off my route. I browsed the steaks for some time. My primary criteria was that the cut should be relatively thin; I imagined that a thick steak wouldn’t work well in the frying pan. I settled on a T-bone, and as it was being wrapped I impulsively ordered a couple of small pork chops to boot. My family would be gone for two nights.

Then it was on to the side dish. The good people at Myrtle Avenue Market, I noted, had in stock a bewildering number of variations on my side dish of choice - namely, the Ore-Ida brand frozen potato product. There were tots, there were hash browns, there were crinkle-cut fries. I decided to go with the thick “steak fries,” thinking that they would provide a more authentic steak-and-potato experience. From there, all I needed to complete the perfect meal was a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and a fresh pack of cigarettes for dessert. I walked back to my car about $20 poorer, but with high hopes for the evening to come.

Once home, I placated the cats with a can of Natural Value Albacore ‘N’ Tuna, poured myself my first glass of soda (over homemade ice) and logged onto the Internet to look for instructions. I quickly found just what I was looking for at the Food Network: a recipe for what they were calling “Pan Seared T-Bone Steak.”

The method would be slightly different than the one I had seen in the movies. The steak was to be fried for four minutes on each side, then finished in the oven for another eight minutes. Then it was to sit for 10 minutes on a bread board, while its stored heat would continue to cook it. The Ore-Idas, I noted, were to be cooked at the same temperature as the steak - 450 degrees - for 18 minutes. Thus, I reasoned, if the potatoes went in the oven at the same time as the steak, they would be finished at the precise moment the meat finished stewing in its own juices.

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