One of the most popular steaks to hit the summer grill is the porterhouse steak. Despite its ubiquitous presence on restaurant menus and retail advertisements, our knowledge of the steak’s origins is muddled. During my tenure at Kern Meat Company, I have run across in my conversations with fellow meatheads different explanations about the porterhouse’s origins and passed along these accounts to my customers. This grilling season, I am determined to set the record straight.

The porterhouse steak owes its name to a type of job or location related to that job. A “porter” in the late 18th and 19th centuries was an individual who transported luggage on a carriage or railway. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a porter’s lodge or a porter’s house referred to a place where a porter resided at an enclosed university campus or a fenced building in the United States. In this role, porters sometimes served as gatekeepers and informal security guards.

Words can have multiple meanings, though. A “porter-house,” in 18th and early-19th-century parlance, also denoted a place that served ales and porters. Those who worked as porters frequented these early drinking houses along with, according to Thomas De Voe in The Market Assistant (1867), “thirsty travelers, old and young bachelors, seamen, and others [in search of] a cold lunch after the English custom — ‘a pot of ale [or porter] and a bite of something.’”

That “bite of something” included broiled beef steaks from the short loin or what contemporaries called the “small loin” or the “small-end sirloin.” As we learn from De Voe again, New York City porterhouse proprietor Martin Morrison sacrificed the small loin he planned on roasting for his family and cut the small loin into steaks for a hungry ship pilot in 1814. The pilot told his seafaring friends that he enjoyed steaks and a mug of porter, and they started frequenting Morrison’s porterhouse as well. After Morrison kept ordering steaks from the small loin rather than keeping it intact, his butcher at the Fly Market took note and started calling them the “cut steaks for the porterhouse.”

As a result, 19th-century Americans did not view the porterhouse as a quality steak, because contemporaries associated it with drinking and ale houses. References to the porterhouse steak in 19th-century literature confirms early American assumptions about the porterhouse. When a character in The Career of Puffer Hopkins (1842) was presented with a choice between “fine slices of liver” and a “porter-house steak without the bone,” he begrudgingly settled for the latter. Other extant sources from the 1860s sneeringly labeled the porterhouse as a “boarding-house” steak because it was often tough, which is likely due to how contemporaries cooked the steak or the presence of the so-called vein or nerve. Roasting the small loin, as De Voe noted, was the preferred cooking method in the 19th century, and eating-house cooks likely applied the same cooking principles to the steak as they would the roast.

Humble origins aside, the porterhouse steak gained popularity and market value in the United States, Canada and England throughout the remainder of the 19th century. Recipes found in influential cookbooks such as Felix J. Déliée’s The Franco-American Cookery Book (1844) and magazines such UK-based Hearth & Home and Harper’s Bazaar influenced this shift in American attitudes about the porterhouse.

Unlike the traditional roasting method used in the first half of the 19th century, these cookbooks marketed recipes to an emerging middle class and home cooks who could afford a cheaper cut such as a porterhouse. The cookbooks also encouraged new ways to enjoy the steak. Déliée’s recipes, for example, called for porterhouse steaks to be “broiled rare over a brisk charcoal fire” or cooked in butter, and he included six recipes that would please even today’s diners. Countless American newspapers, too, started printing recipes to help gain and influence readership. In doing so, Americans who once turned up their noses at the porterhouse steak suddenly found themselves asking for porterhouses at their local neighborhood butcher.

Still, the porterhouse, listed at 30 cents per pound at one meat market in Lewiston, Maine in 1869, was not as expensive as a sirloin steak marketed at 33 cents per pound.

Certain market fundamentals were at play, as well, that encouraged the growth of the porterhouse steak. The opening of the Great Plains and the explosion of the cattle and meat processing industries after the American Civil War (1861-1865) increased cattle supply, reduced cost to the American consumer, and subsequently allowed packing houses in the Midwest to supply larger quantities of beef to markets throughout the United States.

With supply and demand secured, the porterhouse steak found a permanent place in American cuisine after 1870. The 1876 Grand Exposition Hotel in Philadelphia featured a porterhouse steak. When President James A. Garfield was convalescing in the White House after assassin Charles Guiteau shot him in 1881, James Wormley, the proprietor of the eponymous hotel in Washington, D.C., served the twentieth president “the boiled down essence” of a porterhouse steak.

Recipes for the porterhouse even found its way in breakfast cookbooks, such as Emily Raymond’s Twenty-Eight Breakfasts (1885). At the end of the 19th century, porterhouse steaks were more expensive at 25 cents per pound than what Americans considered an exorbitant “luxury” of the time, a whole chicken at 16 cents a pound. Restaurants also marketed the porterhouse steak at a premium. The City Hotel Dining Room in Sonora, Calif., listed two porterhouses — one obviously larger “family porterhouse steak” at 75 cents and a smaller one at 50 cents. The next most expensive item on the hotel’s menu was a tenderloin steak at 40 cents.

The porterhouse’s meteoric rise from its start in a New York City tavern in 1814 to the predominant steak served up to the 1970s points to a larger trend in the history of meat processing: innovative cuts of meat often have humble origins and then increase in market value as restaurants add them to menus, cooking shows and cookbooks feature the steaks, and grocers display them at the meat market counter of self-service case. One simply needs to point to the explosion of value cuts over the last 20 years that are now mainstream.

What steak will be the next to climb the ranks of choice for US grill enthusiasts? I am going to think that one over this weekend while I prepare a Certified Hereford Beef porterhouse steak using one of Déliée’s recipes from 1844.

The origins of the Porterhouse steak

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