Eggcorn Forum

A porterhouse steak is a “composite” steak, meaning it’s cut at an angle that brings together a portion of tenderloin and a portion of top loin, separated by a bone. The origin of the term is debated, but “porterhouses” were 19th-century American taverns, and the different origin narratives point to this cut being a favorite in those establishments. The term first appears in print just before 1850, but the cut of meat being referred to in that citation might not have been the typical “porterhouse.”

The classic porterhouse is a big, plate-filling cut famous for its size. “Quarter house” seems like a reasonable reshaping in that it emphasizes just how imposingly large this steak is. Examples:

Nothing tastier than a good quarterhouse steak.

Considering how spoiled life is having lived around the corner from Peter Luger, one of most poplular steak houses, I must confess the rare quarter house steak dinner I chose was delicious.

At some point, you need to chomp down on a quarter house steak.

And we’ve got a thirty-2 ounce quarter house steak.

We grab a quarterhouse steak, a fillet, some coconut shrimp, vegetables that we threw on the grill as well.

What about quarterhouse steak? If you want, right? You just can’t have the baked potato, right?

I’ve noted before that a lot of the hits I get these days when looking for eggcorns online come from transcriptions of news videos or social media videos. And some of these just don’t pan out; one transcribed hit for “quarter house steak” led me to a video of a cooking show, but the people involved were clearly referring to their steak as a “porterhouse.” So these days eggcorn-hunters can’t just rely on the transcriptions; we’ve gotta go listen to the videos, too. The sacrifices we selflessly make in order to advance human knowledge….

On the other hand, machine transcription sometimes faithfully reproduces some reshapings where human editors might have just substituted the standard forms. The last three citations above are transcriptions of Facebook or TikTok videos, and in all three cases it sounded to me like the transcription had it right: the speakers were saying “quarter house steak.” The final citation is from Halle Berry talking about the keto diet on a talk show. At this point in the show, the hosts and Berry are talking over each other, and the transcription is, I think, slightly incorrect. I think Halle says, “You can even have a big-ass quarterhouse steak if you want. You just can’t have the baked potato.” A human editor might have been involved here because Berry’s use of “big-ass” seems to have been prudishly censored.