Fearless. Impetuous. Passionate. Impatient. Extreme. These may be odd words to use to describe a steak. But they certainly described my mother. Whatever she undertook, she did boldly, even recklessly. Whether executing a complicated ballet routine or grilling a simple steak, she did so with grand gestures and a blithe disregard for convention. No politically correct chimney starter for my mother, no. She doused the charcoal with gasoline and lit it with a Vesuvian vwoomp! No handsome crosshatch of grill marks. No carefully monitored cooking times or instant-read meat thermometers. She’d throw the meat on the grill, char it until the outside was the color of coal and the inside was barely warm, then slap it onto a plate. She called the steak “Pittsburgh rare”—the black evoking the smoke or perhaps coal from the Pittsburgh steel mills. Yes, it was rare—even still raw in the center, but for any diehard steak lover, it’s nirvana.

“Pittsburgh Rare” Steak