You want some mustard with that?

February 22, 2009 12:45 PM

Waldemar Januszczak shows us how to cook a steak ala Toulouse-Lautrec. Or maybe how not to cook a steak, you be the judge.
posted by nola (33 comments total)

God I love the sound of a steak on the fire.
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 12:57 PM on February 22, 2009

I assume the more wine you drink the better it tastes...
posted by jrochest at 1:02 PM on February 22, 2009

God, I hate the sound of people chewing food.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:19 PM on February 22, 2009 [4 favorites]

If anyone wants to cook this and needs someone to dispose of the extra steaks, I would be happy to provide that service to the MetaFilter community.
posted by grouse at 1:21 PM on February 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

I will eat the cast-off steaks, thank you.
posted by Ron Thanagar at 1:22 PM on February 22, 2009

Bloody inbred royalty.
posted by porpoise at 1:34 PM on February 22, 2009

Wow, that steak costs 3 times as much as it should have.

I cooked a chuck steak sous vide for 24 hours once then finished it with a quick sear on a cast iron griddle. It was as tender and tasty with the bonus of being super cheap. And no wasted meat, which is a sin and disrespectful to the animal who died that one might feast on its flesh.
posted by Tacodog at 1:35 PM on February 22, 2009

Strike the 'as' in my previous comment. I wrote that while having red meat flashbacks.
posted by Tacodog at 1:36 PM on February 22, 2009

What a waste of good steaks.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 1:49 PM on February 22, 2009

I need Toulouse-Lautrec to teach me how to cook a steak like I need Escoffier for painting lessons.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 1:50 PM on February 22, 2009 [3 favorites]

You think this is bad you should see his recipe for Cowpigen
posted by nola at 1:56 PM on February 22, 2009

Is that like wrapping every fucking thing in bacon these days?
posted by munchingzombie at 2:06 PM on February 22, 2009

I think that this recipe was fine when a) you couldn't afford good cuts of meat and b) there was no refrigeration. So you cooked the shit out of crappy steaks that were about to turn, and covered up the bad taste with lots of lots of cheap, wild mustard, which grew freely around the stables.

And oh yeah, you drank lots and lots of absinthe.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:13 PM on February 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Oof, that was painful in several ways. Who is Waldemar Januszczak and why should I listen to him chew steak?

Though now I do really want a steak.
posted by lucidium at 2:21 PM on February 22, 2009

In those days, mustard was also valued for its antiseptic properties, so it was considered particularly ideal for inferior quality meats. As for the two "throwaway" steaks, the mustard could be washed off and tossed to the dogs as scraps.
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:30 PM on February 22, 2009

Ha! Let's see him try that with buttonquail!

Seriously though, I never need to see that host on anything ever again.
posted by Navelgazer at 2:34 PM on February 22, 2009

Waldemar Januszczak is the Sunday Times art critic. He's the best critic writing and speaking on art in the UK at the moment, by a distance. His feature length films on Gauguin, Van Gogh, Lautrec and Picasso should be compulsory viewing for anybody interested in modern painting.
posted by fire&wings at 2:34 PM on February 22, 2009

i dont understand how people managed to cook at all in the old days...i mean, without a smoke detector, how do you know when it's done?
posted by sexyrobot at 2:36 PM on February 22, 2009 [6 favorites]

without a smoke detector, how do you know when it's done?

canaries - when the birds falls off its perch, it's done
posted by pyramid termite at 2:42 PM on February 22, 2009

Explanation of sous vide that is extremely informative about the physics of the process.
posted by jouke at 2:43 PM on February 22, 2009

The new stimulus bill prevents Wall Street executives from partaking in this extravagantly wasteful meal.
posted by zerobyproxy at 3:18 PM on February 22, 2009

If you want beef cooked over a wood fire, you gotta go with Spain or Argentina, imo. Someone please please take me to Spain.

Or, alternatively, give me a chateau and a vineyard so I can cook in a stone fireplace with old vines...
posted by mek at 3:37 PM on February 22, 2009

I much prefer Mark Bittman cooking faux horse meat with a supposedly 1,000 year old Roman recipe and sans the lip-smacking, grunting and chewing noises.

I can vouch for Bittman's recipe - it was deliciously different.
posted by webhund at 3:38 PM on February 22, 2009 [3 favorites]

That looks really yummy. And I didn't know that mustard was a "sauce" back then either. I would have assumed that the recipe meant mustard seed, ground or whole. Oh wait, it's only about 100-150 years ago. Still, I kind of think of mustard was a very recent invention. Like hamburgers.
posted by DU at 4:13 PM on February 22, 2009

I would like Slavoj Zizek to tell me how Genghis Khan preferred his potato chips, please.
posted by moonbird at 5:02 PM on February 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

"They have said Genghis Khan preferred salt and vinegar chips over salt and pepper, that he did not enjoy dip, that he would double dip, and so on, but no, it is perhaps just the opposite. Our wager is that he did not prefer potato chips at all. It is like the scene in Casablanca in which our hero[...]" -- Slavoj Zizek
posted by TwelveTwo at 5:37 PM on February 22, 2009 [5 favorites]

I enjoy dip, copenhagen to be specific.
posted by nola at 6:23 PM on February 22, 2009

Prawo Jazdy cooks a better steak.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 7:00 PM on February 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

Toulouse could've used a frying pan or griddle and made three delicious mustard steaks.

Dirty French painters.
posted by bardic at 3:19 AM on February 23, 2009

Basically sounds like a variation of the original recipe for Chateaubriand, supposedly the Viscount's chef would cook the tenderloin between two other tenderloins (although presumably it could also be cooked between two more fatty, flavorful cuts) and then discard the exterior cuts. This would leave the center steak uniformly pink throughout.

So it's pretty much in keeping with the conspicuous consumption that seems so evident in French cooking of the time period.
posted by vuron at 6:37 AM on February 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Why would he not just cook the steak between two squirrels, seems like such a waste of good steak?
posted by phirleh at 6:41 AM on February 23, 2009 [2 favorites]

(Tacodog) "And no wasted meat, which is a sin and disrespectful to the animal who died that one might feast on its flesh."

Truth. I butchered one of my turkeys this week and felt guilty for wasting the head and intestines.
The meat is damn good though.
Making soup with the bones.
posted by Iron Rat at 7:06 PM on February 23, 2009

Iron Rat - Don't you have dogs and cats? Or a neighbor who feeds raw? Do you fish or crab?

A turkey from your website? They look yummy.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 8:03 PM on February 23, 2009