Is it possible to estimate how the quality of beef from the mid 1800s was compared to today’s beef? The cattle (longhorn?) were range fed but I’m picturing sparse prairie grass, not lush green pastures. Then they walked 50 to 100 miles to market on cattle drives. Did they know to fatten them on corn before slaughter? Did they even have large quantities of corn back then?
I think the many cuts of beef were well known by that time but was a porterhouse from 1875 as nicely marbled as a present day version? Perhaps the cattle barons kept small local herds for their own consumption without them going on a cattle drive.
Meat back then was pretty lean. Feedlots in only a few areas.
Beef is getting leaner after a high point several/ many decades ago- I remember the Rib steak then was a second class steak, with the Porterhouse being the number one. The Rib steak was considered too fatty then.
I don’t think that’s an answerable question, except from the viewpoint of an individual eater; because not everyone prefers the same thing in beef.
Corn-fed, feedlot-raised beef will be more tender and well-marbled. It will also be very bland, because the cattle are getting very little exercise and are being fed and handled primarily to put weight on as fast as possible. Some people prefer it that way, and a lot of people are by now so used to that version that they dislike pasture-raised if only because it’s not what they’re used to. But a fair number of people prefer pasture-raised, which is less tender, but has more flavor.
In addition, different breeds of cattle produce different flavor, and different diets also do so. But saying that one of those flavors is “better” than another is mostly a matter of taste.
I wonder if looking at old photos would provide any insight? I would gather most cattle back in the day were range cattle and not factory farmed, so perhaps today’s free-range cattle would be of similar quality as back then. Also, modern medicine could mean marginal individuals or those with health issues that would have died young back then now survive long enough to mature.
The Wikipedia article on Kobe beef indicates that, while cattle certainly existed in Japan in the mid 19th century, they were not used as a source of meat (or milk) until after ~1868. If that’s true, there would have been no “secret of Kobe beef” to be shared until later than the time period in which the OP is interested.
Feedlot operations didn’t start until after WWII when subsidized corn prices were low enough and the existence of antibiotics made intensive animal agriculture feasible. Beef was actually uncommon in the East because of the difficulty of shipping live cattle that far and the unavailability of refrigeration to preserve butchered meat until ~1880, so most meat in the Eastern US was pork, poultry, and fish. A beef steak from circa 1850 would be lean, switchgrass-and-sand-sage fed meat with the toughness of wild meat and “gamey” taste compared to even pasture grass-fed beef today.
Waygu beef is a modern tradition; cattle were basically just used as draft animals until the Meiji Restoration. Making waygu beef is extremely labor intensive, requiring an almost complete gran diet (and sugar cane residuals for Ishigaki and Iriomote beef) so it isn’t so much a secret as just inconsistent with Western animal husbandry practices even if immigrants had known about them. In the US, pre-WWII Japanese immigrants were brought over as cheap farm or construction labor but were not allowed access to education, citizenship, or participation in government (and legally prohibited from intermarriage with “whites”) so they generally formed very insular communities that were essentially Japanese enclaves.
I don’t have data on how common various packaging types were, but while some beef made it in refrigerated cars to cities where it would be broken down and sold fresh to customers, “tinned” (canned) beef, and “barreled” beef, which is beef sealed in a brine barrel, were common ways of packaging and selling beef in the mid-19th century.
I’ve never had beef brined in a barrel, and have only had canned beef a few times (and I wouldn’t recommend it), I have a hard time imagining brined beef tastes great to modern palates regardless of what the cow ate during its life.
All “city chicken” dishes I’ve ever had were made of pork. I see from an online search that that veal is also used but it seems unlikely that beef from grown cattle would not be recognizable as definitely not chicken.
If we can’t be definitive, lets go for illustrative.
In Rich Hall’s “You can got to hell, I’m going to Texas” he points out that in every western, every rancher, in every cattle drive, with the hired hands surrounded by beef on the hoof the cook only ever prepared beef stew, never steak.
The longhorn was a survivor, indeed flourished in it’s arid environment but the meat was tough as old boots and the dietary equivalent of tire rubber. It was essentially game meat.
Longhorn meat only became a food you’d choose by eat once crossed with the European breeds.
Well into the 20th Century, working cowboys ate more bacon than beef. “Sow-belly, beans, and the old coffee pot” was the traditional description of the camp menu.
Or, as the old song goes:
Oh, it’s bacon and beans most every day,
I’d as soon be a-eatin’ prairie hay!
Come a ti-yi-yippie-yippie-yay, yippie-yay,
Come a ti-yi-yippie-yippie-yay!
We had city chicken often in the 1950s. It was bought cut up in a pack including the wooden skewers. It was pork and veal alternating on a skewer. Mom coated it with flour and pan fried it. I loved it. It was neat to pull each piece off the skewer with your teeth.
This article (quoted in the International Chili Society’s official cookbook) gives a history of the dish:
I too remember those breaded-meat-things-on-a-stick back in the '60s. My mother called them “mock chicken legs.” I could never understand why the hell we were eating veal (which I always thought was more expensive) and pretending it was chicken.
My wife buys stewing chickens from a local farm market. They’re so named because they are hens too old to lay eggs and so lean and tough that they’re only fit to eat after they’ve been boiled for 12 hours, usually with old vegetables or peels that are removed before carving. The result is a flavorful meat very different from white breast meat and similar broth.
The logic behind stewing chickens is very much the same as the logic behind stewing lean beef. Cooks had to learn slow cooking methods to make the meat chewable and tasty. Old recipe books are full of these tips.
I believe the blizzards around the 1880’s were the end of the longhorn for the most part. Hardier Herford and Angus breeds were imported and mixed in. They took more work and oversight but provided better meat, more meat per animal and could survive the winters.
Longhorn were great at surviving and free ranging in Texas. By 1873 and the invention of barb wire, land started to be locked up you could put more work into the European breeds.
