I now present Mr. Mark Twain
"They have beef steak in Europe, but they don't know how to cook it. Neither do they know how to cut it right. It comes on the tablle on a small pewter platter; it is the size, shape, and thickness of a mans hand with the thumb and fingers cut off. It is a little overdone, it is rather dry, it tastes perfectly insepid, it arouses no enthusiam." This is painfully true if one has in mind such as a porterhouse steak as may be found on many American tables: " a mighty one an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the gridiron; dusted with fragarant pepper, enrich with little pieces of melting butter of the most empeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy; archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender yellow fat gracing an outlying district of this county of beefsteak, the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in place."