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BEEF STEAK, FRIED (another way)
Cut the steak as for broiling; on being put into the pan, shift and turn it frequently. Let it be done brown all over, and placed in a hot dish when finished. Gravy may be made by pouring a little hot water into the pan (after the steak is out, and the fat poured away), with a little pepper, salt, ketchup, and flour; the gravy so formed is to be poured into the dish with the steak; send to table immediately. If onions are required, cut them in thin slices, and fry till they are soft. They should be fried after the steak, and merely with part of the fat.
A bare-bones Victorian pan steak with a pan gravy made in the same skillet. The instructions assume a cast-iron pan over a coal range and a cut of beef considerably thinner and tougher than most steaks sold today.
- The hinge: don't overwork the gravyThe water, seasoning and flour go into the pan only after the steak is out and the fat drained. Stir the flour into the residual brown film and hot water until smooth, then let it bubble a minute or two; poured over immediately as directed it will otherwise taste raw and pasty.
- "Cut as for broiling"For Victorian cooks that generally meant a steak somewhere around half to three-quarters of an inch thick, cut across the grain, usually from rump or sirloin; the broiling directions themselves are not reproduced here. A modern 1 1/2-inch steak will not cook through under this method of constant shifting and turning.
- Frequent turning is rightModern practice has come round to this. Turning every 30 to 45 seconds gives a more even crust and a cooler interior gradient than the single-flip rule; "done brown all over" is the goal for a thin steak, roughly 4 to 6 minutes total in a hot pan.
- Ketchup means something elseNineteenth-century ketchup in an English kitchen was usually mushroom or walnut ketchum — thin, dark, salty and not sweet. A teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce or mushroom ketchup is far closer than tomato ketchup, which will make the gravy sugary.
- Quantities for the gravyNone are given. For one large steak, about 1/2 cup hot water and a scant teaspoon of flour makes a thin gravy of the kind intended; it is meant to moisten the meat, not coat it.
- The onionsFried after the steak in part of the reserved fat, thin-sliced onions need 10 to 15 minutes over moderate heat to go properly soft and sweet. If you want them on the plate at the same time as the steak, cook them first, hold them warm, and fry the steak in the same pan.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or dimensions. A single steak of the thickness assumed above would serve one to two. The gravy quantity should be scaled with the number of steaks, not the number of eaters.
Fried steak generally sat lower in the Victorian hierarchy than broiled steak; the "(another way)" in the title simply marks this as a second method for frying steak given in the book. Frying suited households without a clear fire or a gridiron, and the closed cast-iron ranges that were displacing open hearths through the second half of the nineteenth century. The pattern here, of building a quick gravy from the browned residue in the pan, is the domestic English ancestor of what a restaurant kitchen would call deglazing, though it is done with water rather than wine or stock. The bottled ketchups called for -- mushroom and walnut, generally traced back to eighteenth-century English store-cupboard practice -- were among the standard savoury seasonings of the period, valued for adding depth to a gravy made in two minutes from almost nothing. Onions fried separately in the leftover fat reflect the same economy: nothing in the pan was wasted.