Cuts of Beef

Virtually every culture differs on how to cut the cow. Perhaps the most precise (and most anal-retentive, it goes without saying) were the Austrians during the era of the Hapsburg Empire.

The CC presents an excerpt from a classic ("Tafelspitz for the Hofrat") by the great Joseph Wechsberg.

To read it in its entirety, and it's definitely one of the best food tales the CC has ever read, you'll have to go to the source. The apotheosis of the story would be hard pressed to be matched.

Few Americans think of boiled beef as the gastronomic treat it is known for in Central Europe. In Vienna there was a restaurant that was held in high esteem by local epicures for its boiled beef -- twenty-four different varieties of it, to be exact.

The restaurant was Meissl & Schadn, and the boiled beef specialties of the house were called Tafelspitz, Tafeldeckel, Rieddeckel, Beinfleisch, Rippenfleisch, Kavalierspitz, Kruspelspitz, Hieferschwanzl, Schulterschwanzl, Schulterscherzel, Mageres Meisel (or Mäuserl), Fettes Meisel, Zwerchried, Mittleres Kügerl, Dünnes Kügerl, Dickes Kügerl, Bröserlfleisch, Ausgelöstes, Brustkern, Brustfleisch, Weisses Scherzl, Schwarzes Seberzl, Zapfel, and Ortschwanzl.

The terminology was bound to stump anyone who had not spent the first half of his adult life within the city limits of Vienna. It was concise and ambiguous at the same time; even Viennese patriarchs did not always agree exactly where the Weisses Scherzl ended and the Ortschwanzl began. Fellow Austrians from the dark, Alpine hinterlands of Salzburg and Tyrol rarely knew the fine points of distinction between, say, Tafelspitz, Schwarzes Scherzl, and Hieferschwanzl -- all referred to in America, with extreme vagueness, as brisket or plate of beef -- or between the various Kügerls. Old-time Viennese butchers with the self-respect and the steady hand of distinguished surgeons were able to dissect the carcass of a steer into thirty-two different cuts and four grades of meat. Among the first-quality cuts were not only tenderloin, porterhouse, sirloin, and prime rib of beef, as elsewhere, but also fine cuts used exclusively for boiling: two Scherzls, two Schwanzls, and Tafelspitz. In old Vienna, unlike present-day America, where a steer is cut up in a less complicated, altogether different manner, only the very best beef was considered good enough to be boiled.

You had to be a butcher, a veterinarian, or a Meissl & Schadn habitué of long standing to know the exact characteristics of these Gustostückerln. Many Viennese had been born in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's provinces of Upper Austria, Serbia, Slovakia, South Tyrol, Bohemia, or Moravia. (Even today certain pages of the Vienna telephone directory contain as many Czech-sounding names as the Prague directory.) These ex-provincials were eager to obliterate their un-Viennese past; they tried to veneer their arrivisme; they wanted to be more Viennese than the people born and brought up there. One way to show one's Bodenständigkeit was to display a scholarly knowledge of the technical terms for boiled beef. It was almost like the coded parlance of an exclusive club. In Vienna, a person who couldn't talk learnedly about at least a dozen different cuts of boiled beef, didn't belong, no matter how much money he'd made, or whether the Kaiser had awarded him the title of Hofrat (court councilor) or Kommerzialrat.