Season a porter-house steak with salt and pepper and rub with butter. Place on a hot gridiron and let broil on a quick fire on both sides. Make this sauce: Chop 1 onion and brown in 1 tablespoonful of butter; add ½ cup of stock and ½ cup of claret; let boil well. Season and thicken the sauce with a little flour and some chopped parsley. Let boil up and serve at once with the steak.
A plainly built broiled steak with a quick red-wine pan sauce. The only real skill is keeping the sauce moving while the steak rests.
- The hingeMake the sauce first or have the onion already browned. A porterhouse over a hot fire takes only a few minutes a side, and the recipe's "serve at once" means the steak should not sit while you reduce wine.
- Quick fireA gridiron over a quick fire is the equivalent of a very hot grill or a heavy cast-iron pan preheated until it just smokes; the book gives no temperature. Butter rubbed on the meat will darken fast, which is the point, but it also means smoke.
- ClaretNineteenth-century claret is dry red Bordeaux; any dry, moderately tannic red works. Half a cup of wine with half a cup of stock makes only a small quantity of sauce — the recipe does not say how far to reduce it — enough for one large steak.
- Thickening"A little flour" is perhaps a teaspoon; it is best worked into a paste with softened butter and whisked in off the boil, then simmered a minute. Flour shaken in dry will lump.
- StockUnsalted or low-sodium beef stock works best here, and the recipe itself has you season the sauce as you thicken it, after it has boiled down.
- DonenessThe recipe gives no times. Pull a porterhouse at 125-130F internal for medium-rare and rest it five to ten minutes; the tenderloin side cooks faster than the strip.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight; a single porterhouse, carved, serves two or three.
- ParsleyAdd the chopped parsley at the very end and let it come up to the boil only briefly, as directed — longer and it turns drab and loses its point.
Books of this type, arranged as a dish a day with a nation attached to each, are often said to have been common in the American publishing trade in the early twentieth century, when "cooking of all nations" meant less an authentic survey than a set of recognizable flavor gestures. Here the Spanish label rests almost entirely on the wine-and-onion sauce; the steak itself is straightforward American gridiron cookery, and the claret is French. The porterhouse cut, whose name is traditionally traced to the porter houses that sold beer and chops in nineteenth-century cities, though the derivation is disputed, was a prestige steak of the era, and the pattern of broiling meat plainly and then dressing it with a reduced sauce built on browned onion, stock and wine is the everyday domestic descendant of restaurant sauce work — a single small pan standing in for a kitchen full of stockpots.