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Staffordshire Beefsteak
Beat them a little with a rolling pin, flour, and season, then fry with a sliced onion; lay the steaks into a stewpan and pour as much boiling water over them as will serve for sauce; stew them gently about half an hour, and add a little catsup before serving.
A plain braise dressed up with a name: steaks browned with onion, then stewed in their own gravy. The original assumes you know how many steaks you are cooking and what kind of catsup sits in the cupboard.
- Quantity is unstated"Them" refers to a plate of steaks — the book gives no weight or number. Four portions of a braising cut, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb total, suits the method and the half-hour stewing time.
- Choose the cut for the methodThis is a shallow braise, not a grill, so it wants a working muscle: chuck, blade or thin-cut round. A tender loin steak treated this way will be dry and grey.
- "Beat them a little with a rolling pin"Mechanical tenderising, the same job a modern cubing mallet does. Aim to flatten to an even half-inch rather than to shred the meat; the flour dredge that follows will not stick to a wet, torn surface.
- Flour and season, in that orderFlour and season -- The flour is the thickener for the finished sauce — there is no other. The recipe's own order is flour first, then season; dredge the meat and shake off the surplus so it browns instead of pasting to the pan.
- StewpanAny wide, heavy pan with a lid: a sauté pan or shallow Dutch oven. The steaks should sit in one layer, since the boiling water is measured only as "as much as will serve for sauce" — a sauce quantity rather than enough to submerge them.
- Half an hour is short for a braiseThin pounded steaks will be tender in that time; thicker or tougher pieces may well need considerably longer at a bare simmer, or they will still be tough at the point the recipe tells you to serve them. Keep the liquid trembling, never rolling.
- CatsupIn British books of the nineteenth century catsup usually meant mushroom or walnut — thin, dark, salty, closer to Worcestershire than to the sweet tomato sauce the word now means. A tablespoon of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire gives the intended savoury finish; tomato ketchup will make it sweet.
- ServingServes four with mashed or boiled potatoes to take the gravy. Slice the fried onion thinly enough that it softens into the sauce rather than staying in rings.
Regional labels of this kind often owed as much to cookbook convention as to any record of local practice: a familiar dish — floured steak stewed with onion — could be given a county name to set it apart from the other steak recipes around it. Staffordshire lay in the English industrial Midlands, and the method suits cheap, hard-working beef: pound it, brown it, and let it sit in a covered pan while something else gets attention. The catsup at the end supplies depth without stock. Before tomato ketchup became dominant in the twentieth century, "catsup" or "ketchup" in British kitchens generally meant a strained, salted brew of mushrooms or green walnuts, kept in bottles and used by the spoonful.