I recall dimly having read somewhere that
the dish we call “steak tartare” (spellings
vary) or the like isn’t really descended
from the raw meat eaten by Tartar invaders.
It’s supposedly the invention of a Romantic
Era French novelist, who made it up out of
whole cloth (whether Tartars ate raw meat,
kept under the saddle or not) as a gimmick
in a novel of his – the sort of dish that
a barbaric man would enjoy. Afterwards,
French chefs tried preparing the stuff and
found it good. Is there a trace of truth
to this? Was there such a novelist and
such a novel, and was a raw-beef dish
unknown or long-defunct in Europe before
that novel was published?
I don’t know about steak tartare, but raw meat dishes are traditional in the near East and parts of southeastern Europe. Jeff Smith has a recipe for Kibbe, made with raw lamb, onions, and spices, in his book The Frugal Gourmet on our Immigrant Ancestors. He says the dish is Lebanese, but I believe that they have a similar traditional dish in the former Yugoslavia.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. (Oscar Wilde)
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by bibliophage:
**I don’t know about steak tartare, but raw meat dishes are traditional in the near East and parts of southeastern Europe. […]
Ah. So it wouldn’t have taken much
inventiveness to re-invent raw-meat dishes,
and the French presumably had had some
exposure to Eastern European visitors
(in Poland and Russia and probably many
other places, French was the language of
the upper classes then, right?). This makes
me think that I’m (or whatever source I had
was) probably mistaken: maybe such foods
wouldn’t be thought exotic enough. The
Mail Bag article doesn’t really help (I
read it first thing, as I should have
mentioned in my original posting), though
it’s interesting in its own right.