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Cannibal Sandwich, or Beef Tartar
ROUND STEAK, FRESH AND FINE ONION, METICULOUSLY MINCED RYE BREAD, WELL BUTTERED PARSLEY, CHOPPED TO SALT AND PEPPER SMITHEREENS Scrape the finest piece of beef tenderloin you can find, to free it entirely from sinew. Don't chop or run it through a grinder. Season well with salt and pepper and add a squeeze of lemon if you will. Spread thickly on buttered rye and pile minced onion and parsley in little heaps hard by, for mixing or alternately munching between bites. This red-faced raw meat canapé must be made attractive by cross-hatching the top with the back of a knife blade or otherwise dappling it into a decorative pattern, as you would treat a fresh pat of butter or a brewery horse's flank. A pleasing addition is an egg yolk, stirred into the red meaty mass, to make a juicier bite, or the yolk set astride the beef for more personal manipulation with whatever eating gear there is at hand.
Since outdoor chefs sometimes become sick at the sight of so much cooked meat, just as candy-makers choke on candy, the Cannibal Sandwich is a godsend to them. They'll turn down wild turkeys and mix up uncooked hamburgers for private consumption any time of day or night. Another name for this is Beef Tartar, perhaps after the hard-riding Cossacks who roar for raw meat, though they sometimes fall for the refinement of lightly cooking it by laying slices under the saddle next to the steaming horse's flesh and warming it up during a good gallop.
There is nothing simpler to prepare or easier on the stomach than good fresh raw meat; doctors dote on it and the nice rolypoly figures of the citizens of Hamburg itself come from gobbling Gehacktes Rohes Fleisch, hacked raw beef, dainties. Which reminds us that kids at the old swimming hole also "chawed raw beef," but in a different way, by soaking their rivals' clothes in water, jerking them into hard knots and then gloatingly watching their victims trying to untangle them with nails and teeth when they came out all dripping and shivering.
The Hamburg-burghers make a sort of competition out of devouring such mid-meal stayers, to see if they can develop fatter livers than their pâté de foie geese; but more moderate eaters of flesh, slice this sandwich into slim lady fingers and nibble them less cannibalistically, as mere appetizers with schnapps. And by the way, within this generation an old lady remnant of a cannibal tribe in Brazil, when asked to name her favorite snack, replied "Just, give me the tender little finger of a nice fat Indian boy." But lest we be led astray, it is well to remember that Cannibal Sandwiches are naught but hamburgers in the raw, and when the onion is mixed in and the meat fried and stuck between two hunks of bread, well-mustarded, it becomes one of the chief articles of our common daily fare. Thus the Teutonic forms of Hamburg and Vienna (with wienies, or hot dogs) have supplied us with two of our most popular emergency meals.
This is raw beef, often with a raw egg yolk, assembled and eaten at an outdoor cookout. The reasons it cannot be recommended are specific to those two ingredients and to the setting.
- Raw beef and E. coli O157:H7Scraping or hacking a piece of beef works surface material into the mass much as grinding does, even though the author expressly forbids the grinder. Surface bacteria on beef, including Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, are killed only by heat; there is no way to inspect or rinse them away, and the infective dose is very small.
- The raw egg yolkThe optional yolk, stirred in or perched on top, adds a Salmonella enteritidis risk that the rest of the dish does not have. Pasteurised shell eggs exist, but they do not address the beef.
- Written for an unrefrigerated settingThe entry is addressed to the outdoor chef, and the raw seasoned beef is spread on bread and mixed with onion and parsley at the table rather than held cold. Time at ambient temperature is the one variable that turns a low bacterial count into a high one.
- Not the same as a restaurant tartareKitchens that serve steak tartare work from whole muscle cut to order, under inspection regimes and temperature control, and some jurisdictions require a written variance or additional approval to do it. None of that transfers to a home cook with a knife and a picnic table.
- Who is most at riskChildren, adults over 65, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised should not eat raw beef or raw egg at all. Kidney complications from E. coli O157:H7 fall hardest on the young.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe from a source that addresses sourcing and handling, or cook the mixture through, which is what the closing paragraph of the original points out it becomes anyway.
- Reading the ingredient line"Gehacktes rohes Fleisch" is simply hacked raw meat; the round steak of the heading and the tenderloin of the instructions are the author's own inconsistency, not a second preparation.
Raw seasoned beef has a long documented life in German-speaking Europe as Schabefleisch or Hackepeter, sold by butchers by the scoop and spread on rye with raw onion, and Hamburg's version of it is the ancestor the author is reaching for when he ties the hamburger and the wiener together at the end. The Tartar name is folklore rather than history: the story that Central Asian horsemen tenderised meat under the saddle is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere, and "tartare" more plausibly entered French cookery through the mustard-and-caper sauce of that name. The "cannibal sandwich" label is midwestern American, still attached in Wisconsin and Minnesota to a holiday tradition of raw beef on rye with onion, and public health departments there issue a warning about it most Decembers. This book's real subject is the mid-century outdoor chef, and the entry is characteristic of its era's cheerful confidence about raw meat, written well before the food-safety understanding that followed the outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s.