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Rump Steak, Baked, with Onions
Take about two pounds of well-hung tender steak, and fry it in hot fat till it is lightly and equally browned. Take it up, put it in an earthenware dish which has a closely-fitting lid, and pour over it a pint of stock made from bones. Add two moderate-sized onions which have been boiled till tender, two table-spoonfuls of Harvey's sauce or walnut ketchup, two cloves, and a little salt and cayenne. Cover the dish, and bake the steak gently till done enough. Take it up, lay round it an onion, sliced, divided into rings, and fried; and strain over it the gravy in the baking-dish. Serve very hot. Time to bake, two hours. Probable cost, about 3s. 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward braise dressed up as a bake: the steak is seared, then cooked slowly under a lid in stock. A few of the ingredients and the oven language need translating.
- "Bake gently" means 300-325F"Bake gently" — the book gives no temperature, but a slow oven of roughly 300-325F is the usual modern reading. Two hours under a lid in that range should carry a two-pound piece of rump through the tough stage; much hotter and the meat tightens before the connective tissue gives way.
- The cutBritish rump steak corresponds roughly to the American top sirloin. The recipe specifies only about two pounds of steak; a single thick piece will stand up to two hours better than thin individual steaks.
- "Well-hung"Victorian beef was hung in the carcass before sale, which both tenderised it and concentrated the flavour; how long varied with the butcher and the season. Supermarket beef is rarely aged as long; look for dry-aged rump if a butcher offers it, though the long braise forgives a good deal.
- The earthenware dishA lidded casserole or Dutch oven does the job. What matters is that the lid actually fits closely, since the pint of stock is all the liquid there is for two hours.
- Harvey's sauce and walnut ketchupHarvey's was a commercial anchovy-and-soy table sauce, long discontinued; walnut ketchup is a dark spiced condiment made from green walnuts, still made in Britain by a few producers. Worcestershire sauce covers the same ground -- salty, fermented, anchovy-backed -- and two tablespoons is the right quantity.
- Pre-boiled onionsThe two onions that go into the braise are boiled tender first so they collapse into the gravy rather than sitting in it raw. The garnish onion is a third one, sliced into rings and fried separately at the end.
- Strain the gravyThe instruction is worth following: after two hours the cooking liquid holds the two cloves and the wreckage of the boiled onions. Strain it, and reduce it in a pan if it has stayed thin.
- Cost and yield3s 8d was a substantial sum for a family dinner in the later nineteenth century. Four to five servings matches the book's own figure, assuming potatoes alongside.
Cassell's places this among its many rump steak treatments, which is itself a comment on the Victorian kitchen: rump was an everyday beef of the middle-class household, cheaper than sirloin, and cookery books felt obliged to keep finding new things to do with it. The dish belongs to the family of covered-dish braises that English cooks called baking rather than stewing, on the grounds that the heat came from the oven -- a distinction that mattered when a good deal of baking was still done at the local bakehouse or in a range oven fired for other purposes. The two proprietary sauces are the period's signature: Harvey's sauce and walnut ketchup were fixtures of the Victorian sideboard, bottled savoury seasoning that recipes reached for the way a modern one reaches for soy or Worcestershire. Walnut ketchup is the older of the two, an English condiment generally traced to the early practice of pickling green walnuts before the shell hardens.