Steak tartare is a meat dish made from raw ground (minced) beef or horsemeat. It is usually served with onions, capers, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and other seasonings, often presented to the diner separately, to be added for taste. It is often served on rye bread with a raw egg yolk.
The name tartare is sometimes generalized to other raw meat or fish dishes.
A less-common version in France is tartare aller-retour, a mound of mostly raw ground meat that is lightly seared on both sides.
History
Potential link with the Tatars
The idea of eating minced and/ or raw meat was popularized in Slavic regions, associated with Mongol encroachment. They and their Turkic allies the Tatars were known collectively as being from Tartary, which was essentially Mongolia, though the name was a conflation of Tatar with the Greek stories of Tartarus. They had a tradition of finely mincing very tough meats like horse and camel, to make them edible, then binding the meat with milk or eggs. Europeans told stories of this being made by placing the meat under a saddle to ride upon it until tender. It is possible that this story was confusion originating in the use of thin slices of meat to protect saddle sores from further rubbing.
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