Cooking Steak Is My Love Language

I’m barefoot in the kitchen, playing helicopter parent to a steak rapidly approaching done. Cooking steak is a precision science, and my extremely hot pan means only a matter of seconds stand between me and my steak getting to rest. I have a meat thermometer at the ready, tongs clutched firmly in my right hand. My kitchen is hazy and stifling, the air full of animal fat and the fruity black pepper liberally strewn over the meat’s surface earlier that day. My kitchen fan whirs, my best attempt at silencing the fickle roommate that is my smoke alarm. Well, best and only attempt. The heatwave means my windows are firmly shut. I’ll admit it’s not my best work. But I’m trying to impress my girlfriend.

When I want to show a woman how I feel about her, I make her a steak. I’ll invite her over, usually for a fifth date, ostensibly for dinner. Technically, there is a dinner involved, but it’s intended to be the predecessor. Food and desire are inextricably linked. I eat with my mouth and hands, and as a queer person, I have sex with my mouth and hands. To consume before consummation feels like the natural order of things, and usually by the fifth date, I’d like to explore.

I say the steak is for my lovers, but in practice, it’s just as much for me. I know red meat isn’t the healthiest choice. Colon cancer is on the rise, and I have a family history of it, as it is. And let’s be honest, who among us is really eating the right amount of fiber? But I’m a late-in-life meat eater, and so, there’s a hedonistic novelty in it all. Biting down into a medium-rare, heavily salted piece of meat, and allowing the juices to slowly seep out of the muscle fibers and into my mouth, and then following that bloody bite with a big swig of sparkling wine? That’s an experience still new to me. I keep waiting for the familiar to come bursting in, to steal this new experience, for the steak to become banal. But steak has yet to fail me.

I don’t remember the first time I disappointed my mom, but in many ways, it was inevitable. I’m a South Asian daughter. I was simply continuing the legacy passed down to me through the umbilical cord, generation after generation. To my parents’ credit, it was difficult to disappoint them as a child. They doted on me, celebrated my failures and successes. There was no shortage of love in my house. Disappointing them became easier as time went on, as I individuated.

It wasn’t the usual things that disappointed them. No, my coming out was a relative non-issue compared to my peers. Sure, tears were shed, and we went to a few family therapy sessions, but they came around quickly and welcomed the steady string of girlfriends I had in high school. My first tattoo and undercut yielded similar reactions. Ultimately, my parents were fine. I think that’s why it was so jarring when I disappointed them for the first time in a big way, in my mid-twenties, when I started to expand my diet.

My mom sends me a lot of Instagram reels. I think it’s one of the ways she expresses her love, a way for her to show me she’s thinking about me without needing to pick up the phone and call. She loves to send me reels about the risks of eating red meat, as though I don’t already know. This was, like most of my choices, an informed decision. I put my red meat consumption in the same category as my drinking, or my occasional gel manicure habit. All of these things are bad for me, and I should eventually stop, but right now, they bring me pleasure and I’d rather compensate for them in other ways. I am aware that my carbon footprint is huge, especially compared to what it used to be. And I know that cattle farming can be inhumane, that it’s definitely contributing to the warming planet. I don’t really have a way to reason out of those things. I just try to consume in moderation.

I do exclusively buy my meat from a whole animal butcher. It feels like the best way for me to be doing this. This means that I still go to my old neighborhood when I need a steak. I could find someone more local, cheaper, too, but I’m attached to the zero waste butchery of it all, and there’s a tradition I’ve built around this that I’m loath to abandon. I like structure and routine, after all. I’ll walk to the butcher when the weather’s nice. It’s a long walk, but I don’t mind. It gives me time to think about what I want to serve along with the steak: crispy roast potatoes, a miso Caesar salad, or maybe a crunchy cucumber side to contrast with the chewy richness of the meat. I wait in line behind the legging-clad Park Slope moms who bring their terrifying toddlers to the butcher, toddlers who press their little fingers against the glass, leaving marks, marveling at the encased sausages. I’m also marveling. I’m still new to the whole experience.

When it’s my turn, I inform the staff I’m looking for a steak. This is entirely unhelpful to all involved. A steak is just any hunk of meat, often beef, so they ask me about my intended preparation. For a long time, I made my steaks over high heat following Samin Nosrat’s guidance in Salt Fat Acid Heat, rendering down the fat and cooking a heavily salted, room temperature steak in the resulting liquid. Lately, though, I’ve been partial to a reverse sear. It’s more forgiving, and I’ve found myself in need of more forgiveness lately. I tell the people behind the counter this and they nod. They usually send me home with a ribeye. I’m trying to show off for a woman, after all.

The irony isn’t lost on me that as a person raised lightly Hindu (or Jain, depending on which of my parents you ask), my reverent act that I perform for women is actually wholly irreverent. Or it would be, if I had a religious bone in my body. I haven’t told my mom that my fifth date ritual is to cook a steak for a woman. She’d hate that. My grandmother would too, but she died before I could come out, both as a gay person and a meat eater.

I made a steak last month. It wasn’t a fifth date, more like a twenty fifth. But I had never made her a steak before. Our first few dates were colored by my egg freezing, so I was otherwise occupied. I walked the long way to my whole animal butcher, stopping at the market along the way (I always stop at the market). I picked up a ribeye, salted it in the morning, and left it in the fridge to dry out. I popped it into the oven when she left her house and into the pan when our joint salad attempt was finished. She brought flowers and wine, and for a few minutes, we pretended it was a fifth date.