A Question of Doneness

Here is a question that rarely gets a proper airing in popular food culture: when did the world start eating rare meat?

I had been thinking about how much of European cooking, particularly for beef and lamb, treats medium rare as the default, the aspiration, the marker of a meal properly prepared. And yet, across vast swathes of the world – Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, North Africa – meat is cooked through. Not pink. Not blushing. Done. What we in the Western food world somewhat dismissively call “well done.”

And that led me to a second, sharper question: when exactly did well-done become synonymous with dried out? Because if you think about it for even a moment, cooking meat all the way through while keeping it succulent and tender probably demands more skill, not less, than pulling a steak at medium rare.

It turns out the answers to these questions unravel some deeply held assumptions about what constitutes good cooking.

A brief history of rareness

The word “rare” applied to meat traces back to the older English word “rear,” meaning underdone. The earliest print reference appears around 1615, in Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-wife. But here is the interesting thing: Markham actually warns against it, describing rareness as unwholesome. The concept existed, but it was not initially a compliment.

The preference for underdone beef solidified as a cultural identity marker in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. By the 1700s, the roast beef of old England had become famous throughout Europe. The British preferred their beef plain and simply roasted, and this was bound up with national identity in a fascinating way. Roast beef was seen as a symbol of English frugality, unfussiness, manly virility, and prosperity – a pointed contrast to foreign food dressed up with elaborate sauces. The French noticed, naturally, and coined the term “les Rosbifs” as a gentle jab at this very British obsession.

The French, for their part, pushed things even further toward the rare end. Their taxonomy of doneness runs from bleu (barely seared) through saignant (literally “bleeding”) to a point, which they consider the ideal middle ground but which most British or American diners would still call rare. The term a point is revealing in itself. It literally means “to the point” or “perfect,” which rather gives the game away: built into the very language is the assumption that medium rare is the correct state of affairs, and everything else is a deviation from perfection.

Why most of the world cooks meat through

The geographic split between rare-preferring and well-done cultures is not arbitrary. There are several interlocking reasons, and they rarely get discussed together.

The first is the question of which animals are being eaten and how they are raised. The European preference for rare meat is overwhelmingly a beef phenomenon, and to a lesser extent lamb. It developed in cultures where large, well-fed cattle were available and where the dominant cooking method for prestige meals was roasting whole joints over open fires or on spits. Northern European cultures had abundant grazing land and a tradition of raising large ruminants, giving them access to the big, tender cuts that lend themselves to quick, hot cooking.

In much of Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, the dominant meats have historically been goat, mutton from older sheep, and chicken – all leaner, tougher, and enormously improved by slow, thorough cooking. The culinary traditions of these regions developed around braising, stewing, and slow-roasting with aromatic spice pastes and liquid, precisely because the animals available demanded it. A goat leg from a free-ranging animal in Rajasthan or the Levant is a fundamentally different proposition from a well-marbled side of English beef. You would not want it rare. It would be chewy and unpleasant.

The second factor is climate and food safety. In hot climates without refrigeration, meat spoils quickly, and parasites and bacterial contamination are more dangerous. Cooking meat thoroughly was a practical survival strategy that became culturally embedded over millennia. The elaborate spice traditions of Indian, Middle Eastern, and North African cooking are not just about flavour. Many of those spices – turmeric, cumin, garlic, chilli – have genuine antimicrobial properties. The entire culinary grammar evolved around the assumption that meat would be cooked through.

The third is a structural difference in how meat features in the meal itself. In the European tradition, especially the British one, a large piece of meat is the centrepiece, carved at table, served in thick slices. The interior of the joint is the star, and its colour and texture become the focus of preference. In most Asian, Middle Eastern, and subcontinental cuisines, meat is cut into smaller pieces before cooking and incorporated into sauces, curries, stews, and rice dishes. It is a component of a larger composition, not a solo performer. When you are cooking meat in a complex curry with yoghurt, tomato, and a dozen spices for two hours, the question of whether the interior is pink is simply irrelevant. The entire cooking philosophy is different.

The inconvenient history of roast beef

There is a complication in the rare-steak-as-ancient-tradition narrative, and it is a significant one. For most of European history, cattle were far too valuable to raise just for eating.

Medieval cattle were primarily oxen used as draught animals to pull ploughs, and cows provided milk, cheese, and whey. Zooarchaeological evidence tells us that among cattle remains from medieval and early modern sites, the overwhelming majority were adults. These animals were being kept alive for work and dairy and only slaughtered at the end of their productive lives.

The deliberate breeding of cattle specifically for beef is astonishingly recent. Robert Bakewell was the first to breed cattle primarily for meat, and this was in the mid-eighteenth century, from around 1760 onwards. Before Bakewell, cattle were first and foremost kept for pulling ploughs or for dairy, with beef from surplus males as a secondary benefit. And the cattle of that era were nothing like what we eat today: extremely large-framed, late-maturing animals, flat-muscled, with finished steers weighing as much as 3,000 pounds when marketed at four to five years of age.

This creates a genuine paradox. The “roast beef of old England” that became a symbol of English identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost certainly not particularly good beef by modern standards. It was meat from old working animals or spent dairy cows – lean, tough, and fibrous from years of hauling ploughs through heavy clay soil. The idea that this meat was being served pink in the middle and celebrated as a national delicacy is, frankly, a bit hard to square with the likely reality.

If most beef before the late eighteenth century came from retired draught animals, you would think it would have been treated more like the goat and mutton of Asian and Middle Eastern cooking: slow-braised and stewed to break down all that tough connective tissue. And in fact, a great deal of medieval English meat cooking was exactly that – pottages, stews, pies, and long-braised dishes. The “roast” in roast beef referred to spit-roasting over an open fire, which for a tough old ox would have been a long, slow process by necessity, not the quick high-heat affair we associate with a modern medium-rare steak.

The preference for rare beef, in the way we understand it today, may only become truly viable after Bakewell and his successors created purpose-bred beef cattle that were young, well-marbled, and tender enough to eat pink. The whole rare-steak culture we think of as ancient and traditional may in reality be largely a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Europe’s quietly forgotten braising tradition

And this brings us to another thing that gets swept under the carpet in the modern rare-steak-as-sophistication narrative: the vast majority of the European meat cooking canon is braised, stewed, and slow-cooked food.

France has boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, pot-au-feu, daube provencale, cassoulet, blanquette de veau, navarin d’agneau. These are not minor dishes in the repertoire. Pot-au-feu was considered the foundational dish of French home cooking for centuries. Italy has osso buco, bollito misto, brasato al Barolo, ragu that cook for hours. Germany has sauerbraten, which marinates for days and then braises for hours. Hungary has goulash. Belgium has carbonnade flamande. Ireland and Britain have their stews, their pies, their potted meats.

These are all dishes where the meat is cooked completely through, often for many hours, in liquid, until it is falling apart. And they are, by any honest reckoning, far more representative of what Europeans actually ate for most of history than a pink steak. The steak-frites or the Sunday roast carved pink at the table is the exception, the relatively modern prestige dish, not the everyday reality.

What is particularly telling is that even French haute cuisine, now so closely associated with rare meat, was built on a foundation of stocks, sauces, and braises. The entire mother sauce system, the fonds de cuisine that Careme and Escoffier codified – these all assume meat is being cooked slowly in liquid. The clear consomme, the demi-glace, the jus: they all come from hours and hours of gentle extraction from bones and tough cuts. The vast majority of classical French technique is about making tough, cheap, well-done meat taste extraordinary.

When “well done” became an insult

The stigma against well-done meat is, I think, a relatively recent phenomenon, probably emerging in its current virulent form during the mid-to-late twentieth century with the rise of American steakhouse culture and the professionalisation of food criticism. Before that, opinions were more varied. Early twentieth century cooking texts actually warned against rare meat, echoing their seventeenth century predecessors.

The shift happened through a confluence of factors: the post-war boom in American steakhouse dining, the influence of French haute cuisine on Western food culture with its built-in bias toward rare, the rise of food media and celebrity chefs who adopted rare and medium rare as a marker of sophistication, and the development of better refrigeration and food safety which made eating rare meat safer and therefore a viable mass preference rather than a risky one.

There is also a class dimension that is hard to ignore. Ordering rare became a signal of culinary knowledge and confidence, a way of distinguishing yourself from the unsophisticated masses. “Well done” became coded as the preference of people who did not know any better. This is a remarkably snobbish position when you consider it globally, since it effectively dismisses the culinary traditions of most of the world’s population.

The question of skill

And this brings me to what I think is the sharpest point in this whole discussion. Cooking meat well done and keeping it juicy is arguably a harder technical challenge than cooking it medium rare.

A medium-rare steak is relatively forgiving. You sear it, you pull it at the right temperature, and the internal fat and moisture do most of the work. But cooking meat all the way through while retaining succulence requires genuine understanding of technique: low-and-slow methods, the use of marinades and braising liquids, knowing when to rest meat, understanding carry-over cooking.

This is precisely what the great non-European meat traditions do extraordinarily well. A properly made rogan josh. A Yemeni mandi. An Egyptian fattah. A Chinese red-braised pork belly. These are dishes where the meat is cooked completely through and yet is falling-apart tender, deeply flavoured, and anything but dry. The “well done equals dry” equation only holds true if you are applying the European method of dry-heat cooking – grilling, roasting – and simply leaving the meat on too long. It is a failure of technique being treated as an inherent property of the doneness level.

The real irony is that the Western culinary world has been slowly rediscovering this. Low-and-slow barbecue, sous vide cooking, 24-hour braises: these are all methods of cooking meat well past medium rare while keeping it spectacularly tender and moist. They are essentially the same principles that Indian, Middle Eastern, and East Asian cooks have been using for centuries, repackaged with modern technology and different cultural framing.

The anomaly, not the standard

So to answer the question I started with: the world did not “start” eating rare meat so much as one particular culinary tradition, rooted in northern Europe’s specific agricultural conditions, animal breeds, and cooking methods, developed a preference for it and then, through colonial and cultural influence, managed to position that preference as the universally correct one. It is a classic case of a regional habit being elevated to a universal standard.

The traditions of cooking meat thoroughly – the way India, the Middle East, and much of Asia have done for millennia – were not just appropriate for the animals available in those regions. They were also how most of Europe cooked its beef for most of its history. The rare steak is the anomaly, the latecomer, the product of a very specific set of agricultural innovations in eighteenth century England that created an animal that had never existed before: one bred purely to be eaten young.

The Indian cook making a slow-braised nihari, the Moroccan cook building a tagine, the French grandmother assembling a daube – they are all working within a tradition that has far more in common with the historic European mainstream than the modern rare-steak orthodoxy does.

The irony is almost perfect.