Steak-frites

The meal most often served in French cafés and restaurants is steak and French fries — steak-frites, as they say. For decades it's been the French version of our American burger and fries, but with the advent of McDonald's and other fast-food chains, I wonder if the burger isn't now catching up. (Hamburgers catch up... ketchup... ha ha ha.)

French steaks are very lean pieces of meat. Some Americans are put off by them, because they are so different from the "marbled" corn-fed beef we are used to eating in the States. Steaks in France do have a different flavor compared to U.S. beef, and I assume that too is because the cattle graze on grass. The steaks you get in French restaurants or cafés are often a lot smaller than American steaks, too.

A French-style steak-frites, served with sauce béarnaise.
The lean French beef is good served with rich buttery sauces.

The word for beef in French is bœuf, which is also the word for the animal we call an ox. In English, we have one word for the name of the animal and a different word for the name of the meat we eat (sheep/mutton, pig/pork, and so on). In French, the language uses the same term for both, so you eat pig, sheep, or ox directly, not indirectly, if you see what I mean.

The different cuts of beef that are grilled as steaks (variously spelled steak, steack, biftek, or bifteck) are bavette (flank steak), entrecôte (ribeye), rumsteck (rumpsteak, according to the dictionary, or round steak, I think), faux-filet (sirloin), and tournedos or filet de bœuf. If you want a thicker steak, you order a pavé de bœuf — literally, a "paving stone" of beef. I think it's often pavé de rumsteak.

All the French cuts of meat are slightly different from the U.S. cuts because the meat itself is different and so are the butchering techniques and conventions. For example, there's a cut called onglet, which the Robert-Collins dictionary doesn't translate but just calls "prime cut of beef" (in italics in the dictionary). I think it might be called hanger steak in America — or is it skirt steak? Or are they the same thing? By the way, filet mignon is a term that in the U.S. applies to beef, but in France means pork, specifically pork tenderloin.

Because the French steaks are so lean, they tend to get very tough if they are cooked much past medium-rare, and in France well-done steaks are considered inedible by many. In response to the question « Quelle cuisson pour le steak ? » (How do you like it done?), the correct answers are bleue (very rare — almost raw, really — just flipped over in the pan and slightly browned on each side) or saignante (which more or less means "bloody" or very rare).

According to the dictionary, saignant as a degree of doneness means « viande rôtie ou grillée, peu cuite et dans laquelle il reste du sang » — meat roasted or grilled but only lightly cooked and in which there remains some blood. Bleu as applied to meat means « Très saignant, à peine grillé » — very rare, barely grilled.

Another acceptable answer to the degree-of-doneness question about steaks is à point, which means "just right" but usually comes out as about medium rare in American terms. In theory it means "medium" but as anywhere, the actual degree of doneness you'll get if you order your steak à point will vary from place to place and time to time. Cooking beef is not exactly a science. Judged by American standards, the French tend to undercook their steaks.

On an Internet travel forum I participate in, an American woman on her first trip to France wrote in and said that after eating at one Paris café, she had realized it was a terrible restaurant because the steak was hardly cooked at all. "It was like eating beef sushi," she said. "I'm used to raw fish, but I like my beef just slightly pink, not raw." I told her that that was how steak is served in France — nearly raw — unless you specify that it be cooked more thoroughly, and that the café is question is not a bad restaurantat all, IMHO. I've eaten there three or four times and enjoyed it. It's all a matter of conventions and expectations.

This was yesterday's lunch. Béarnaise is a hollandaise sauce
that is made using a reduction of vinegar, white wine, shallots,
and tarragon as its base. And lots of butter and egg yolks, bien sûr.

I haven't had a hamburger in a French restaurant in many years, but I remember from time gone by that the hamburger would be made very thick out of very lean meat and served extremely rare. If you were expecting an American-style hamburger, it was surprising or even off-putting to be served such a rare patty of almost purple ground beef.

So if you really like your steak cooked well-done — well, then don't order steak in France. That's what a typical French person would tell you. Cooked well-done, it won't be good, or even edible. It's too tough, and it'll be dry. In French, well-done is bien cuit — well cooked — but you don't even need to know that expression!