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Originally posted by joatmonv:
Smoked a pork shoulder. It turned out decent considering I have a natural gas grill with a smoke box inside the grill.
I used cherry and pecan wood. Cooked at 235 degrees for about 6 hours.
I'm seriously considering a Traeger.

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What did you guys make for dinner this weekend?

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Originally posted by Skins2881:

quote:

Originally posted by joatmonv:
Smoked a pork shoulder. It turned out decent considering I have a natural gas grill with a smoke box inside the grill.
I used cherry and pecan wood. Cooked at 235 degrees for about 6 hours.
I'm seriously considering a Traeger.

I do this all the time, it's a pain in the ass to keep reloading wood, but turns out yummy.

Thinking about getting a SMOKEMIESTER so I only have to load once.

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Also, consider an A-Maze-In insert as a short term smoke solution for your grill.

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Originally posted by Sig2340:
I can accept that my missing dinner invitation was a simple screw up by the U.S. Mail, but two days in a row?

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IT was Friday evening at V.F.W. Post 4591 in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., and the scene was a vegetarian’s nightmare.

About 350 men, seated shoulder to shoulder at long tables, were devouring slices of beef tenderloin and washing them down with pitchers of beer. As waiters brought trays of meat, the guests reached over and harvested the pink slices with their bare hands, popping them down the hatch.

Each slice was perched on a round of Italian bread, but most of the men ate only the meat and stacked the bread slices in front of them, tallying their gluttony like poker players amassing chips. Laughter and uproarious conversation were in abundance; subtlety was not.

As anyone in northern New Jersey could tell you, this was a beefsteak. The term refers not to a cut of meat but to a raucous all-you-can-eat-and-drink banquet with a rich history in Bergen and Passaic Counties.

The events, which typically attract crowds of 150 or more, with a ticket price of about $40, are popular as political meet-and-greets, annual dinners for businesses and civic groups, and charity fundraisers. Caterers said they put on about 1,000 of them in the region last year.

“Once you start going to beefsteaks, it’s an addiction,” said Al Baker, a Hasbrouck Heights policeman who had organized the evening’s festivities to benefit the Special Olympics. “You’ve got the tender beef, butter, salt, French fries, beer — all your major food groups. But it’s very unique to North Jersey. I go to other places and nobody’s heard of it.”

That would have come as a surprise to many New Yorkers of generations past. Back in the days before cholesterol testing, beefsteaks — boisterous mass feeds featuring unlimited servings of steak, lamb chops, bacon-wrapped lamb kidneys, crabmeat, shrimp and beer, all consumed without such niceties as silverware, napkins or women — held sway in New York for the better part of a century.

The ritual was documented by the writer Joseph Mitchell for the New Yorker magazine in his 1939 article “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks.” As Mr. Mitchell told it, the beefsteak came into being in the mid-1800s, became popular as a political fund-raiser and vote-buyer, and began a slow decline when women started taking part after being granted suffrage in 1920.

Mr. Mitchell’s essay has become something of a Rosetta stone among fans of old New York and carnivorous foodies, prompting considerable hand-wringing among those born too late for the beefsteak era.

As it turns out, they’ve been living through it all along. Across the Hudson River, just 15 miles from Midtown Manhattan, the Bergen-Passaic beefsteak scene has been continuing without New York attention for the past 70 years. It amounts to a remarkable two-way cultural disconnect: The New Jersey events are organized by, catered by and attended by people who are unaware of the beefsteak’s New York pedigree, just as New York’s nostalgic beefsteak historians have been oblivious to the New Jersey beefsteaks taking place right under their noses.

It’s not clear how the beefsteak migrated westward from New York, or how it went from many meat courses to just beef tenderloin (which, according to Mr. Mitchell’s account, may be closer in spirit to the beefsteak’s origins). But there appears to be broad consensus on the genesis of the New Jersey version: In 1938 — a year before Mr. Mitchell’s manifesto — a Clifton butcher and grocer named Garret Nightingale, known as Hap, began catering parties with a set formula.

He grilled tenderloins (the muscle used for filet mignon) over charcoal, sliced them, dipped the slices in melted butter, served them on slices of white sandwich bread, added French fries on the side, and let everyone eat as much as they wanted. This he called a beefsteak. Within a decade, it had become an entrenched local phenomenon.

Hap Nightingale died in 1982. By that time he had passed the business on to his son, Bob, who turned it over to his son, Rob, in 1995. The second- and third-generation Nightingales continue to run the operation today out of an unassuming Clifton house where Bob Nightingale was raised and still lives.

Their business office is the house’s cramped basement, and the tenderloins are grilled over hardwood charcoal in the driveway before being taken to the beefsteak venues. From this unlikely command center, the Nightingales catered over 600 beefsteaks last year, going through 88,000 pounds of tenderloin in the process.

“I don’t know where my father got the idea, frankly,” Bob Nightingale said one recent afternoon. “But he had good timing. As men came back from World War II, the community would throw them a beefsteak. Lots of them went to work in the local rubber and textile plants, so the unions grew, and they started throwing beefsteaks too. That’s how it spread.”

Along the way, some protocols developed, most notably the habit of stacking the accumulated bread slices instead of eating them. This routine saves valuable stomach capacity for more beef while simultaneously serving as an informal scorekeeping system to determine how many beef slices the person has consumed. At some beefsteaks, the person with the biggest stack wins a prize.

The Nightingales have made only a few changes since the early days: They now dip the meat slices in margarine instead of butter (“Butter can burn more easily,” Rob Nightingale explained). The sandwich bread has been replaced by Italian bread (it holds up better to the drippings, although some attendees complain that it’s harder to stack). Relish trays have been replaced with bowls of tossed salad, and the French fries, which were once cooked in rendered fat trimmings from the tenderloins, are now fried in vegetable oil. Otherwise, the Nightingales pretty much stick to the script established by their founder.

“Some people — usually women — try to dress it up, make it more than it is,” Rob Nightingale said. “They’ll want a pasta course, or antipasto. We’ll do it if that’s what they want — you know, business is business — but it’s not the same.”

Ah, yes, women. Their attendance at beefsteaks has been controversial for some since the 1920s, and that gender gap apparently persists today.

“A man isn’t inclined to eat as much if his wife or girlfriend is watching,” Rob Nightingale explained. “After their 15th or 18th slice, she kind of gives him the look and makes him stop.” (Mr. Mitchell put it more succinctly: “Women do not esteem a glutton.”)

Although the recent Hasbrouck Heights event — put on by a local police group — was stag, the Nightingales said about 75 percent of their beefsteaks are now co-ed.

The Nightingales’ principal competitor is Baskinger’s, a Clifton delicatessen located just down the road from the Nightingale compound. Although both companies have their fierce loyalists, the distinctions appear minimal. The primary differences are that Baskinger’s cooks its tenderloins on an indoor gas grill (they used to grill them outside, until a neighbor complained) and dips the slices in butter, not margarine.

Baskinger’s got into the beefsteak business in 1973 and is run today by Joe Argieri, who joined the company in 1983. “At that time, I was in my 20s and had no idea what a beefsteak was,” he said. “I grew up in Nutley — the only beefsteak I knew about was beefsteak tomatoes.”

To put that statement in perspective, consider that Nutley is only six miles south of Clifton. But it’s over the county line, in Essex, which in beefsteak terms means it may as well be in Kansas.

“Whenever I travel, whether down south or wherever, nobody’s ever heard of the beefsteak,” Mr. Argieri said. By “down south,” he meant southern New Jersey.

This “only in New Jersey” sentiment, which was echoed by dozens of Bergen and Passaic residents, highlights an enduring mystery: Why did the beefsteak disappear from New York just as it was gaining a foothold in New Jersey?

A partial answer lies in the declining civic role of several crucial New York beefsteak sponsors, including the Tammany political machine, labor unions and fraternal organizations.

But Waldy Malouf, the chef and a co-owner of the Manhattan restaurant Beacon, thinks the answer runs deeper than that. In 2001 he started holding an annual beefsteak, patterned after the ones described by Mr. Mitchell (this year’s edition is next Tuesday, Feb. 5).

It’s a grand event, with roasted whole sirloin and roasted potatoes (as well as lamb chops, bacon-wrapped kidneys and crabmeat), rather than the grilled tenderloin and French fries of New Jersey. But it’s essentially a nostalgic party, a novelty, while the New Jersey beefsteaks are vibrant staples of the local culture.

“I think that’s because the beefsteak is a very community-based thing, and today’s New Yorkers don’t always have a very strong sense of community,” Mr. Malouf said. “And as Manhattan eventually got more sophisticated and less blue-collar, the beefsteak may have become frowned upon here.”

Another factor that probably contributed to the New York beefsteak’s demise: cost. While the New Jersey kind calls for only one cut of beef, New York beefsteaks entailed multiple meat courses, which ratcheted up the price.

That theory is bolstered by Howard Itzkowitz, a retired butcher who was an owner of the William Wertheimer & Son meat market on First Avenue and 19th Street from 1955 through 1978. This shop was described in Mr. Mitchell’s treatise as “the headquarters of the East Side school” of beefsteak. The shop is no longer in business, but Mr. Itzkowitz, now 80 years old and living in Palm Harbor, Fla., is a living link to the New York beefsteak era.

“It was a good time, but it got too expensive for people,” he recalled. “By the late ’60s, it was just about over.” Asked if he realized that beefsteaks had also been taking place in New Jersey at the time, he said: “No, we always thought it was a New York thing. I never knew they were doing it anywhere else.”

If only he could have witnessed the scene in Hasbrouck Heights a few nights earlier. One of the more enthusiastic participants that evening was Tommy Mason, 75, a retired real estate appraiser who has been a regular beefsteak attendee since he returned home from the Korean War in 1955.

“You can’t be courteous at a beefsteak, and you can’t be shy,” he said, demonstrating his point by reaching for another slice of beef. “But it’s all in good fellowship, and nobody gets out of hand. I’ll do it till the day I die.”