Season a round steak with salt, black pepper and paprica; dredge with flour and let fry in hot lard on both sides until brown. Then add some sliced onions and moisten well with tomato-sauce. Cover and let simmer half an hour. Serve hot on a platter with mashed potatoes.
February 16 — No. 16
Swiss
A straightforward braise, but the original assumes a thick round steak and a heavier hand with the pounding than the text admits. Two details are worth fixing before you start.
- Pound the flour inThe recipe says only to dredge, but round steak is lean and tough; the usual method for this dish is to hammer the seasoned flour into both sides with a mallet or the edge of a heavy plate. This breaks up the muscle fibres and the flour that goes in with it helps thicken the sauce.
- Half an hour is not enoughA round steak simmered thirty minutes will be flour-thickened but still chewy. Give it 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer, covered, adding liquid if it reduces too far, and stop when a fork goes in with no resistance.
- Cut and quantityBuy a piece of top or bottom round about 3/4 to 1 inch thick, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb, which serves four. Thinner sandwich-cut steak will fall apart over a long braise.
- LardUse lard if you have it, or bacon fat; both give the browning the dish expects. Vegetable oil works, but keep the pan hot and dry the meat first or the flour will gum rather than crust.
- Tomato-sauceAt the time this was written this meant a plain cooked tomato sauce, not the sweetened jarred pasta sauce sold today. A 14-oz tin of crushed or chopped tomatoes with their juice, thinned with a little water or stock, is closer to the intent. "Moisten well" reads as enough to come halfway up the meat, not to cover it.
- PapricaSweet paprika, about a teaspoon. Smoked paprika will dominate the dish and is unlikely to be what was intended.
- PanUse a heavy skillet or Dutch oven with a lid that fits. A thin pan will scorch the flour on the bottom during the long simmer; scrape up the browned bits when the tomato goes in.
The name is generally said to have nothing to do with Switzerland. "Swissing" is an old textile and leather term for passing material through rollers to soften and flatten it, and it is usually offered as the likely source of the name, carried over to meat pounded or run through a mechanical tenderizer; the dish is generally traced to American cooking rather than to any European original, with printed references clustering in the early twentieth century. Its appearance in a book of "dishes of all nations" says more about how loosely such collections used national labels than about geography, and the recipe itself is pure economy cooking: a cheap, hard-working cut from the hind leg made palatable by flour, fat, onion and a long wet simmer. Mashed potatoes are specified alongside the flour-thickened tomato gravy.