"At a contemporary beefsteak it is unusual for a man to do away with more than six pounds of meat and thirty glasses of beer."
Joseph Mitchell’s great 1939 New Yorker story, “All You Can Hold For Five Bucks.” profiles the NYC tradition of the working-class beefsteak dinner, which was begun in the 1880s by political machines and has long-survived only in obsolescence. An excerpt from the article about how women, who began attending the banquets in the 1920s, “corrupted” the tradition of the beer-soaked beef-fest:
“It didn’t take women long to corrupt the beefsteak. They forced the addition of such things as Manhattan cocktails, fruit cups, and fancy salads to the traditional menu of slices of ripened steaks, double lamb chops, kidneys, and beer by the pitcher. They insisted on dance orchestras instead of brassy German bands. The life of the party at a beefsteak used to be the man who let out the most enthusiastic grunts, drank the most beer, ate the most steak, and got the most grease on his ears, but women do not esteem a glutton, and at a contemporary beefsteak it is unusual for a man to do away with more than six pounds of meat and thirty glasses of beer. Until around 1920, beefsteak etiquette was rigid. Knives, forks, napkins, and tablecloths never had been permitted; a man was supposed to eat with his hands. When beefsteaks became bisexual, the etiquette changed. For generations men had worn their second-best suits because of the inevitability of grease spots; tuxedos and women appeared simultaneously. Most beefsteaks degenerated into polite banquets at which open-face sandwiches of grilled steak happened to be the principal dish.”
