First off, you may be wondering why I am talking about steak tartare on a Jewish-Viennese cultural food blog: Is it some rite of passage, an infamous entry gate to cannibalism? Will I speak about two raw-meat-eating Jews, Freud and Lanzmann, to address some anti-Semitic medieval stereotypes of Jews feeding on brave Christians, preferably innocent children, and little babies? About a hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud was eating steak tartare for breakfast every day, a fact which his cook and long-time servant, Paula Fichtl 1 , recorded in her diaries.
She was in the service of the Freud family from until the death of Anna Freud in We know that Freud had a bit of steak tartare every morning, or at least in his later years, when his increasingly severe jaw cancer made it difficult to chew or even talk.
Freud had to undergo several troublesome operations, and eventually ended up with a prosthesis which kept his oral and nasal cavities separated. It would have been a rather shocking thing to someone like her, having been raised to keep kosher in a quite pious home and for whom, thus, blood is unacceptable in food and must be removed before consumption.
Freud firmly objected to kosher rules, and throughout their time together, had strongly opposed any form of religious ritual in their Viennese home. However, due to her upbringing as a Jewish housewife, Martha would have had her objections to serving her husband a simple heap of raw meat bloody at that.
Meanwhile, steak tartare was nonetheless served to Sigmund Freud in a bloody mound, together with his customary soft-boiled egg. They are themselves a symbol of virility. Add to that the myth, legends, and imagery associated with steak tartare, and we see plenty of male power, in a symbolic sense. But more on that later.
