Broiled Flank Steak with Mustard Mashed Potatoes

In 1994, yours truly sat in a grubby apartment, roach-infested apartment, reading Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking.

Building management suggested we purchase geckos to eat the roaches. Animals of the four-legged variety were not permitted.

(Forbidden.)

So a youthful version of yours truly sat in the chair she’d hauled in from the curb (grad student interior decor) reading Laurie Colwin’s  “Flank Steak: The Neglected Cut.” Sometimes she was joined by an interested roach, who read along. (not pictured.)

By now I’d sampled the occasional flank steak, always in fajita form. In her essay, Colwin doesn’t discuss fajitas. Instead, she describes a colleague who boils a flank steak. Even as a culinary novice, I knew this was a bad idea. Would you boil hamburger? Put leg of lamb in the toaster? People get funny ideas when it comes to food. Then again…well, never mind.

More sensibly, Colwin offered a recipe for marinating flank steak with soy sauce, olive oil, garlic, and pepper.

Flank steak was still cheap in 1994. Meat had yet to become a source of liberal handwringing. Butchering wasn’t a hip job requiring ink, piercings, or familiarity with Baudrillard. Meat was sold in chain supermarkets, wrapped in earth-smothering styrofoam. Nobody thought a thing of it.

Back at Chez Roach, I covered the meat in crummy red wine, soy sauce, and a little garlic before sticking it beneath the broiler. This all transpired in the dark: turning on the oven and the lights blew the fuses.

Dinner was soon ready, and it was excellent. Here was a classic Colwin dish: little work, endless payoff.

Flank steak remains a favorite. Unfortunately, it is no longer cheap. Happily, it is economical in that every bit is edible. Further, flank steak is delicious hot, cold, or lukewarm, and works well with a wide variety of sides.

As starving grad students, we were fond of flank steak alongside piles of mashed potatoes. Actually, we’re still fond of flank steak alongside mashed potatoes, though we’re no longer starving.

People are extremely particular about their mashed potatoes; terms like “fanatic” and “mania” come to mind. Nigella Lawson and Tamasin Day-Lewis warn against refrigerating the finished product. Julia Child sternly advises against placing a lid on a pot of waiting mash, lest it become “stovey.” Anthony Bourdain, writing in Appetites, claims knowledge of Joel Robuchon’s famed mashed potato recipe, which he cannot divulge. If he were to tell us, he’d have to kill us.

You’re gonna die over mashed potatoes? 

Which brings me to the egg.

My grandmother always stirred a raw egg into her mashed potatoes. I thought this normal until the night a dinner guest watched me crack an egg into a bowl of steaming potatoes. She freaked.

My grandmother kept kosher. An egg replaced the dairy she couldn’t use. Should you go this route, add the egg while the potatoes are steaming hot. Stir quickly–you don’t want an omelet in there–and, of course, use only the freshest eggs.

I want to say the idea for adding mustard to mashed potatoes came from the late, much-missed Gourmet magazine. We are devoted to Amora mustard, which is neither cheap nor subtle, though adding it to potato softens its sharper edges. Prior to discovering Amora, courtesy of David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen, I used Dijon. Start with two tablespoons and taste–this may be enough. And don’t salt your mash until after adding the mustard, as mustards are often quite salty.

This is the sort of meal you can prepare on a weeknight, or serve to friends with whom you are on mashed potato rather than the competitive dinner party terms.

Months after moving out of roachville, I ran into a former neighbor, who gleefully told me the city had cited the building owners for vermin infestation. The gecko suggesters had been fired. “I wonder who reported them,” She said.

I just smiled.

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