I have two bros-in-law who are excellent cooks. When they cooked their meat, the steaks or meat were tender and juicy. I marveled at how good they tasted. One of my sisters said that's because mother was an awful cook. I had to agree with her. Terrible thing to say about your mother, but you had to have a good set of incisors and molars to bite into and chew her food.
My mother isn’t at all a terrible cook. It’s just that to her, and to her mother who taught her on up the line, meat that is the least bit “raw” is a bad thing, possibly unhealthy and even dangerous. She has a point, up to a point. Undercooked chicken (salmonella) or pork (trichinosis) actually is problematic. So is much of what passes for hamburger (e. coli) these days.
There are ways to cook meat to a pulp that are delicious though, all involving a crock pot, lol. Pot roast is one, she’s a master at that, fork tender. Southern country style steak is another. It’s cube steak, which was once a cheap cut, cooked for hours with homemade brown gravy. All trace of toughness for which cubE steak is known are gone. Done right it’ll fall apart on your fork, no need to really even use the edge of the fork.
There’s a world of food outside traditional southern fare though. I’d never put her in charge of grilling steaks. Neither did my dad, lol. He grew up on a farm and love old fashioned cooking but he was also very well travelled. He’d “bring back” foods from his travels in his head and try them out himself, sometimes to great effect, sometimes not, lol.
Cooking on fire outside was men’s territory. Inside was women’s other than special occasions like breakfast for dinner on a weekend, unusual stuff like that.