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Onions, with Beef Steak, Etc
Take two large Spanish onions; remove a thin piece off each end, and peel off the outer skins; cut them into slices a quarter of an inch thick. Place an ounce of butter or good dripping in a saucepan, let it melt, then put with it a pound of steak, divided into pieces a little thinner than for broiling. Brown these in the butter, add a little pepper and salt, the sliced onions, three ounces more of butter, but no liquid; cover the saucepan closely, and simmer as gently as possible till done. Arrange the steak neatly in the centre of a hot dish, boil up the onion gravy sauce with a table-spoonful of walnut ketchup, pour it over the meat, and serve immediately. Chickens or rabbits are sometimes cooked in the same way. Time, about an hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A dry braise: no stock or water goes in, and the liquid in the finished dish is the juice the onions and meat give up into a good deal of butter. Two things decide whether it works — the heat and the cut.
- Heat is the hingeWith no added liquid, the pan will scorch if the flame is anything but the lowest you can manage, and the butter will brown and split. Use a heavy pan with a tight lid, and set it over the smallest burner turned low, or transfer it to a 300F oven once the onions have begun to sweat.
- Choose the cut for the timeAn hour and a half will destroy a modern sirloin or rump steak. Buy chuck, blade or skirt, cut into pieces a little thinner than you would for grilling as the recipe directs, and treat this as a braise rather than a fried steak.
- Spanish onionsThen as now these are the large, mild, pale-skinned onions, and their sweetness and water content are the point. Two large ones is roughly 1 1/2 lb; ordinary yellow onions work but are sharper and give less juice.
- Four ounces of butterOne ounce to brown the meat and three more with the onions comes to a full stick, which is generous for a pound of steak. Half that is enough to keep the pan from catching if you would rather not pour off fat at the end.
- DrippingBeef dripping is the period alternative and will not burn as readily as butter in the initial browning. Any neutral fat or a mix of butter and oil serves the same purpose.
- Walnut ketchupA thin, dark, salty condiment of green walnuts, vinegar, spice and often anchovy, once a common British store-cupboard sauce. It is still made in small quantities; mushroom ketchup is the closest substitute, and a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce with a splash of vinegar approximates the sharp-savoury note.
- Finishing the sauceLift out the steak, then boil the onion gravy hard for a minute or two with the ketchum to concentrate it and emulsify the butter. If it looks greasy, spoon off some fat before reducing.
- Chicken and rabbitJointed chicken thighs take about 45 minutes by this method; a rabbit, which is very lean, wants the full hour and a half and benefits from a little more fat or a few strips of bacon.
- YieldAs stated, two or three portions. Serve with mashed or boiled potatoes to take up the onion butter.
Steak stewed with onions and no water belongs to a family of nineteenth-century British "smothered" dishes, in which the vegetable supplies all the moisture and the flavour concentrates rather than dilutes he etuvee logic of the French kitchen. A probable cost of 1s 6d is given, which places it squarely in the range of a modest household dinner, and the alternative of rabbit says the same thing: rabbit was the cheap meat of the period, not the delicacy it has since become. The walnut ketchup is the most dated element here. Bottled ketchups of walnut, mushroom and anchovy were established in Britain well before the tomato version, and a Victorian cook might plausibly have reached for one to give a braise the dark, salty depth we now get from a dash of Worcestershire or a spoonful of soy.