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Beefsteak with Mushrooms
Take four pounds of the best sirloin steak, cut thin. Season with black pepper, and a very little salt. Put four tablespoonfuls of butter into a frying pan, and put it over the fire. When it is quite hot, lay in the steaks and let them brown.
Have ready a quart of mushrooms, stemmed and skinned, and moisten with a pint of water, seasoned with a little pepper and salt, and thickened slightly with a good dredging of flour. Pour it over the steaks in the frying pan, and then let them cook till thoroughly done. Venison steaks will be found excellent dressed in this manner, but the venison must be fresh.
A plain pan sauce built in the same skillet as the steak. The one thing worth ignoring is the final instruction.
- "Till thoroughly done"Sirloin cut thin and then stewed in liquid until well done will be grey and dry. Brown the steaks, remove them to a warm plate, build and reduce the mushroom sauce, then return the meat for a minute or two at the end.
- A quart of mushroomsMeasured whole and loose, that is roughly 10 to 12 oz of button or cremini mushrooms.
- Stemmed and skinnedNineteenth-century cooks peeled the caps of large field mushrooms, whose skins were tough and often gritty. Cultivated mushrooms need neither peeling nor stemming; wipe them and trim the base.
- Four tablespoonfuls of butterHalf a stick of butter in a hot pan will brown and then burn before 4 lb of steak has coloured. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, and get the pan properly hot before the meat goes in.
- Cook in batchesFour pounds of steak will not brown in one frying pan; crowded meat steams. Sear in two or three lots, then deglaze the fond with the seasoned water.
- "A good dredging of flour"About 2 tablespoons for a pint of liquid gives a light sauce. Whisk the flour into a little cold water first, or dust it over the mushrooms as they cook, to avoid lumps.
- A pint of waterTwo cups, and plain water makes a thin gravy. Beef stock, or water with the pan drippings scraped up into it, gives the sauce something to be. Let it reduce a few minutes before the steaks go back.
- YieldFour pounds of sirloin serves six to eight generously.
- The venison noteVenison is leaner than beef and dries out faster still, so the caution about long cooking applies doubly. "Fresh" here means not hung long or high, a real concern when much venison came from the game market.
Beefsteak with a mushroom gravy was familiar American hotel and household cookery, and its appearance here says as much about mushrooms as about beef. Mushrooms are often said to have been gathered more often than bought for much of the century, which may be why the recipe assumes they arrive with stems and skins to be dealt with; commercial mushroom growing in cellars and caves expanded in the United States in the last decades of the 1800s, and a quart of mushrooms was something a town cook could reasonably expect to buy. The closing line about venison is a period habit as well: household books of this era treated deer as an ordinary market meat and are generally said to have offered game as a substitution in beef recipes, with a warning about freshness attached.