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Beefsteak Smothered in Onions
Slice the onions thin and drop in cold water: put steak in pan with a little suet. Skim out onions and add to steak, season with pepper and salt, cover tightly, and put over the fire. When the juice of the onions has dried up, and the meat has browned on one side, remove onions, turn steak, replace onions, and fry till done, being careful not to burn.
A one-pan steak-and-onion braise-then-fry from an era when a covered skillet over a wood range did the work of a lid and low heat. The order of operations is the whole recipe: the onions steam first, then the steak browns.
- The hingeDo not lift the lid until the onion liquid has cooked off. The covered stage steams the onions in their own juice and keeps the steak from searing; only once the pan is dry does browning begin. Rushing this gives you grey meat and crunchy onions.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and rarely at supermarkets. Rendered beef fat, lard, or a neutral oil with a knob of butter behaves the same way. "A little" means a tablespoon or so in a heavy skillet.
- The cold-water soakDropping sliced onions in cold water leaches some of the sulphur compounds and softens their bite. Drain and shake them well before they go into the pan or the extra water lengthens the covered stage considerably.
- "Over the fire"Medium heat on a modern burner, not high. The pan is covered and full of moisture at this stage, so there is nothing to be gained from a hot flame except scorched onions at the edges.
- Cut of steakThe recipe names no cut. The method suits a relatively thin steak, of the kind that will cook through in a covered skillet; a thick modern ribeye will overcook on the outside before the centre catches up.
- "Fry till done"In this period 'done' generally meant cooked through rather than pink. For a thin steak in a hot dry pan, two to four minutes a side after the onions come off will bring it to medium; use a thermometer if you want 130-135F for medium-rare.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; a pound of steak with two large onions would serve two to three. Scrape the pan and pour the onions and any browned fat over the meat rather than leaving them in the skillet.
Smothering — cooking meat under a tight lid with vegetables until their moisture is spent — was a standard nineteenth-century range technique, useful for the tougher, leaner cuts. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio and first published in 1877, drew on recipes contributed by local women, which helps explain the compressed, assume-nothing style: a cook who had never fried a steak was not the audience. Steak with onions appears in cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic through the century, and the pairing is old enough that no origin story is worth trusting; what dates this version is the suet and the skillet lid standing in for temperature control.