Hamburg Steak
Is made of round, chopped or grated very fine, then season with pepper, salt and grated onion. Fry in hot fat.
Four ingredients and one sentence of method, which puts all the weight on the grind and the pan. A few notes on what the original assumes you already know.
- "Round" and the grindRound is the lean cut from the rear leg, commonly around 85-90% lean once ground, and it will cook dry if you treat it like modern 80/20 chuck. A coarse grind, or hand-chopping, gives a better texture than the "very fine" grate called for, which compacts easily.
- Grated onionGrating rather than dicing has the effect of releasing juice into the lean meat, and the onion disappears in the cooking. The recipe gives no quantity; about a tablespoon of grated onion per pound is a reasonable starting point. Drain off the loosest liquid or the patties will steam rather than brown.
- HandlingMix the seasoning in with a light hand and stop as soon as it is distributed. Overworked lean beef turns springy and bouncy, which is the main failure mode of this recipe.
- "Hot fat"Lard, beef drippings or butter in a heavy skillet, and genuinely hot -- a drop of water should skip. Because round carries little fat of its own, added fat is doing the browning here, not just preventing sticking.
- Timing and donenessFor a patty about three-quarters of an inch thick, three to four minutes a side. Note that this is ground meat: current guidance is 160F throughout, since grinding distributes surface bacteria through the interior. The original gives no temperature at all.
- QuantityReckon 5-6 oz of meat per person, shaped into one or two patties. A pound makes three generous portions.
- Serving as intendedThe recipe stops at the pan and says nothing about how the dish reached the table. Plated meat courses of the period were commonly served with a gravy or brown sauce, fried onions or potatoes; there is no bun here, and no bread is mentioned.
Hamburg steak reached American cookbooks by way of German immigration in the second half of the nineteenth century, usually said to be named for the port rather than for any single dish of the city; the general pattern of seasoned chopped beef, cooked or raw, was long established across northern Europe. By the 1880s and 1890s it appears in American household manuals and restaurant bills of fare as a plain, respectable meat course, and it was also recommended for invalids and for people with weak digestion, on the theory that finely chopped meat was easier to assimilate. That there is no mention of bread is the point of interest: the sandwich version was spreading through fairs, lunch counters and factory-gate stands in exactly these years, but a 1906 home cookbook still treated the patty as a steak, cooked and served like one.