ST. LOUIS — Summer is coming to a close. The arrival of cooler temperatures means backyard barbecue season will also soon end, meaning St. Louis residents don't have much longer to enjoy their favorite cut of meat.
Pork steaks, a food known to appear on grills across the area, has been tied to the region for generations. So much so that one local grocery chain has laid claim to the pork cut's invention.
The Schnucks website, on a page titled "How the Pork Steak was Born," credits the food's invention to two second-generation Schnuck family members named Don and Ed in St. Louis sometime in the 1950s. The invention was allegedly the result of the two wanting to offer an inexpensive cut of meat for grilling.
The claim, however, has since been disputed by a food historian specializing in southern barbecue who says pork steaks have been around a whole lot longer.
So, who's correct? We VERIFIED the claim to find out.
The question:
Did the Schnucks family invent pork steaks in St. Louis during the 1950s?
Our sources:
- Food historian Robert Moss
- Schnucks
- Google Books archives
- Newspapers.com archives
The answer:
No, Schnucks did not invent pork steaks. The unique meat cut appeared in places across the country before making its debut in St. Louis. The city, however, played an important role in popularizing it as a sought-after barbecue staple.
What we found:
A suspect Wikipedia entry that has since been deleted was what thrust Robert Moss into a food rabbit hole that he wasn't expecting.
The entry claimed that pork steaks were invented by Winfred E. Steinbruegge of Florissant in 1956. Moss, looking to confirm the information, quickly found the claim was false and partly stemmed from Schnucks' invention claim.
"I made the mistake of clicking on the 'View History' tab on the 'pork steak' entry, and boy did it take me down a rabbit hole," Moss wrote in his blog post. "In April 2014, an anonymous contributor added a sentence about the origin of the cut, which it attributed to a different St. Louis grocery store."
That grocery store was Schnucks, and the attribution came from a Feast magazine article from 2013. The article provides more detail into the Schnucks pork steak origin story, going as far as to say that "Schnucks Markets was exclusively cutting and selling pork steaks to St. Louisans before others noticed its popularity and followed suit."
Moss was able to find numerous examples of pork steaks existing much earlier than the 1950s, when Schnucks claims the cut was invented. The earliest newspaper clippings that mention pork steaks date to the early 1800s from newspapers across the eastern United States, including New York, Vermont and South Carolina.
Detailed instructions for both how to cut and how to cook pork steaks appear in books from the early 1900s. "A Course in Household Arts" from 1916 describes what part of a pig a pork steak is cut from, and a 1933 book from the North Dakota Agricultural College has detailed pictures of the steak.
The first mention of pork steaks in St. Louis supermarkets dates back to 1913, when local supermarket Remley first advertised the product at 12 cents per pound. Remley would continue to advertise the product for years before its ownership changed hands numerous times and it closed in the 1960s.
Perhaps the most damaging evidence to Schnucks' claim appears in a 1947 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which shows an advertisement placed by the then-named Schnuck Markets selling pork steaks at 45 cents per pound.
"It's possible Schnucks had never heard of a pork steak and the two guys came up with the idea independently and they figured they invented it," Moss told 5 On Your Side. "But, we can clearly find that the same kinds of cuts of meat were appearing in 1920s butcher manuals, 30 years before the story."
When asked whether they could provide historical documents or records that relate to Ed and Don Schnuck's alleged creation of the meat in the 1950s, a Schnucks spokesperson responded:
"As you can probably figure, there is no one who is working at the company now that would have been around back then so I can only provide the information that has been given to me which is the same that is on our website."
So, if pork steaks weren't invented in St. Louis, how did they become such a staple in the city? Moss attributes the city's affinity to a combination of residents' love for ribs, a popularization of the backyard barbecue and how inexpensive pork steaks were.
"Ribs were hugely popular in St. Louis. When [restaurants or butchers] would run out of ribs or if ribs were too expensive, they would start slicing up a pork steak," Moss said. "[Backyard barbecuing] really took off after World War II, when it became part of the 'good life' and part of the suburbanization of America. That's when all the grills, and all the charcoal, and barbecue sauce sales and all of that really took off. [Pork steaks] really took off when backyard barbecuing was becoming sort of an American tradition."
Archived newspaper clippings also seem to back up Moss' assessment. The first time pork steaks appeared in a St. Louis newspaper, outside of an advertisement, was in a 1931 article in the St. Louis Star and Times titled "You'll like pork steak instead of chops for a change."
"If you are stressing economy you will be interested to know that a slice of fresh pork will cost considerably less per pound than the cured ham," the article read.
Another article from 1941 called pork steaks an "economy cut" while another from 1942 said that "the thrifty homemaker will often find that steaks cut from the [pig's] shoulder offer a real bargain."
Even though pork steaks weren't invented in St. Louis, what we do know is that the unique cut of meat has become a staple of the region and will stay that way for generations to come.
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