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Vienna Steaks
Take one pound of lean rump steak, one ounce of ham, and one good onion, and pass them all through the mincing machine. Add a tea-spoonful of sweet herbs, half a tea-spoonful of ground mace, and two beaten eggs. Incorporate thoroughly, and make up into cakes or balls. Fry in boiling fat for half an hour. Serve very hot, with finely-shredded fried onions, or a whole braised onion on each steak.
A straightforward minced-beef patty enriched with ham and egg. The only genuinely misleading instruction is the frying time.
- Half an hour is far too longCakes of this size cooked in hot fat need roughly four to five minutes a side, or eight to ten minutes total. Thirty minutes would leave a dry, dark crust and a grey interior; the original figure likely assumes a much cooler pan and larger, thicker balls than most cooks would shape today.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat brought to frying heat, around 350-360F, when it shimmers and a crumb sizzles at once. The recipe does not say which fat; beef dripping or lard would have been the usual choice in a kitchen of this date.
- The mincing machineA hand-cranked table mincer, screw-clamped to the table. A food processor pulsed in short bursts works, but over-processing turns the mixture pasty; ask a butcher to coarse-grind rump, then mince the ham and onion separately and fold them in.
- Sweet herbsA dried mixture of the kind commonly used in Victorian kitchens, typically some combination of parsley, thyme, marjoram and savory; the exact blend varied. A teaspoon of mixed dried herbs is the equivalent; fresh needs about three times as much.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less sharp than the seed. Half a teaspoon of ground mace in a pound of meat is assertive but correct for the period; grated nutmeg at half the quantity is the nearest substitute.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified, which was often taken as read. The ham contributes some salt, but the mixture still wants about a teaspoon of salt and a good grind of pepper. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture first to taste it before shaping the rest.
- BindingTwo beaten eggs in a pound of meat is generous and makes a loose mixture. Chilling the shaped cakes for twenty minutes before frying helps them hold together in the pan.
- YieldAbout four steaks of four ounces each, or six smaller ones. Serve with the fried shredded onion as directed.
Vienna steak was one common British name, from the later nineteenth century onwards, for a seasoned minced-beef cake fried and served hot with onions — often associated with the Austrian and German dishes travelling under names like deutsches Beefsteak, though the lineage is more a plausible connection than a documented one. The label attached itself to any minced steak dressed up with herbs, egg and a little ham or bacon, and it survived in British canteens and cafes well into the twentieth century. Its presence in a dictionary of cookery suggests something of how useful the mincing machine had become in the late-Victorian kitchen: a screw-clamped iron mincer made cheaper cuts, and yesterday's cold joint, into something that could be shaped, seasoned and served as a dish in its own right rather than as an obvious economy.