[randomdata]

The story is a good one, but I'm not sure it adds up.

Most curiously, what is never explained is what the servants actually called the animal. At the time there was no singular term for cattle or sheep in English. Any reference to the individual animals was more specific, e.g. bull, heifer, steer, cow, ewe, ram, etc.

But once you've cut up the animal, that specific differentiation becomes difficult to track. For all intents and purposes the meat is the same. The idea that the servant would say "time to cook the heifer" or "time to cook the steer" seems suspect. In fact, unless the servant in the kitchen was also the butcher, it is highly unlikely they would even know if the meat came from a heifer, a steer, or what have you in order to be able to speak to it as such.

It seems likely even the servants called it "beef" or, at very least, some other equivalent term of the same intent.