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Hamburg Steak
Cut a piece of tender steak half an inch thick. With a sharp knife scrape off the soft part till there is nothing left but the tough stringy fibres. Season this pulp with salt and pepper, make it into little flat round cakes half an inch thick, and broil them for two minutes. Serve them on rounds of buttered toast.
This is the invalid-cookery version of Hamburg steak: beef reduced to a pulp with the back of a knife rather than put through a mincer, so that none of the connective tissue reaches the plate. The technique still works, but the cooking time needs rethinking.
- Scraping, not mincingLay the half-inch slice flat and draw the knife across the grain, so the soft muscle pulps away and the silverskin and gristle stay behind, as the recipe directs. A food processor will not do this; it chops the tough parts in rather than leaving them out.
- Cut to useThe recipe says only "tender steak"; a lean, open-grained cut such as sirloin, rump or top round suits the method. Very fatty or heavily marbled steak is generally reckoned to scrape less cleanly, the fat smearing rather than separating.
- Two minutes is not enoughOnce beef is scraped it behaves like mince: anything on the surface of the original steak is now distributed through the cake. Broil to an internal 160F, which for a half-inch patty under a hot grill or in a heavy pan means roughly three to four minutes a side. The two minutes in the original leaves the cakes barely warmed through, consistent with a period willingness to serve beef very underdone, particularly to invalids.
- Broiling"Broil" in period usage generally means cooking over direct heat, on a gridiron over coals. A ridged cast-iron pan or an overhead broiler at its highest setting is the nearest equivalent; the patties are too loose for an open wire rack unless well chilled first.
- HandlingSeason and shape with a light hand and keep the pulp cold. Compressed scraped beef turns dense and liverish; the point of the preparation is that it stays loose.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weights. Scraping discards the gristle and stringy fibre, so expect a noticeable loss from the raw slice; one slice makes a small number of little cakes and the matching rounds of toast.
Hamburg steak entered English and American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, the name generally traced to the port of Hamburg and to the German emigrants who passed through it; "Hamburg steak" appears on New York restaurant menus well before the bread roll that later gave us the hamburger. Scraping is being taught as a method: the same knife-scraped pulp turns up throughout Victorian and Edwardian invalid cookery, where beef stripped of every fibre and tendon was thought digestible by patients who could manage almost nothing else, and where the briefest possible cooking was held to preserve the meat's strengthening virtue. The habit of serving it on a round of buttered toast belongs to that sickroom tradition, as does the small portion.