A sweet friend who shares my birthday once offered to throw a joint “sushi party”. The term sushi party should have made me nervous, but I was so touched by her gesture that I accepted without asking for details.
My friend had recently acquired a little bamboo mat and wanted to try her hand at some spicy tuna rolls. To acknowledge certain red flags – such as the fact that we were 20 years old, dumb, on student budgets, and almost a thousand kilometres from the ocean – seemed trivial. But I’m sure that everyone who attended that party has never again eaten raw fish in a landlocked backyard before asking where it came from.
What my sweet, well-intentioned friend didn’t know was that decent sushi isn’t made with just any old fish; sashimi-grade fish is harvested using specific methods that slow its decomposition and keep it crisp, fresh and safe to eat. Similarly, not every dish of chopped and seasoned raw beef is steak tartare – and calling it so doesn’t make it edible.
One glorious raw beef dish reminiscent of tartare is Ethiopian kitfo, made with minced raw beef and mixed with a mitmita (a chilli and spice blend) and a slick of spiced butter known as niter kibbeh.
In the United States, raw beef has been removed from a lot of menus. When it is offered, it’s accompanied by footnotes warning the diner of the risks of eating uncooked meat. New Orleans’s famous greasy spoon diner, The Camellia Grill, was once known for The Cannibal Special – a dish of raw ground beef and chopped onion on rye. A couple of months ago in Wisconsin, a holiday appetiser of raw ground beef and onion on rye, known as cannibal sandwiches, was blamed for spreading E. coli among residents. It wasn’t the first time cannibal sandwiches were held responsible for an outbreak.
I adore rare burgers, but I won’t order them just anywhere anymore. I’d rather eat a good quality, thin, fast-food-style burger cooked medium-well than take a chance on 99 per cent of what’s out there in the red and juicy lane. Still, when it’s good, there are few things more satisfying than rare meat.
The best thing I’ve eaten this year was a barely seared beef carpaccio in Birmingham, Alabama. Arranged in overlapping pink slices, it was six bites of meaty, melting bliss. I’ve also had excellent carpaccio at Italian restaurants in Abu Dhabi, where the quality of available meats has consistently improved over the years.
I used to love watching my Lebanese grandmother make kibbeh nayeh, a dish of raw, lean ground lamb (or beef), fervently loved throughout the Arab world.
In Worcester, Massachusetts, she had to be especially choosy about sourcing her meat. She’d visit her butcher first thing in the morning, before the scales and meat grinder had been contaminated with lesser meats. She’d bring it home and shape the glistening mound with her hands, kneading in fine-grain bulghur, sweet onion and seasonings, eventually forming a smooth, elliptical loaf. Using a spoon, she made indentations in the kibbeh, where green olive oil would pool when she poured it generously over the top. Then she would garnish the whole thing with fresh mint leaves, warmed a pile of Arabic bread, and call us in to graze.
Nouf Al-Qasimi is an Emirati food analyst who cooks and writes in New Mexico
