Haru Onuki
BAKED STEAK WITH VEGETABLES
Put steak in a baking tin, dredge with flour and season with pepper and salt; put in oven with water almost enough to cover for twenty minutes. Then cover with onions sliced and cook for twenty minutes more. Next cover with slices of tomato and return to oven and cook for ten minutes. Take from oven, baste well, sprinkle thickly with grated cheese and put back in oven only long enough to brown.
I think cooking is lots of fun if you have a great big stove and plenty of room. I am not much on the inconveniences of a chafing dish.
A plain oven-braise dressed up with a French-sounding title. The method is sound, but the recipe assumes a cook who knows her stove and her butcher.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this: hot enough to reduce the liquid and brown the cheese at the end, gentle enough that a braising cut relaxes rather than seizes.
- Choose the cut for the methodFifty minutes in water almost deep enough to cover is a braise, not a grill. Use a thick slice of chuck or bottom round about an inch and a half thick. A tender steak treated this way comes out grey and dry.
- Water almost enough to coverThat is a lot of liquid, and it dilutes everything. Beef stock in place of water, and a level just short of covering, gives you a pan sauce worth spooning over the meat instead of pale broth.
- Dredge with flourThe flour is there to thicken the liquid, not to make a crust — it will not crisp under water. Season the meat first, then flour it lightly, and expect the pan juices to bind as they reduce.
- The onions need a head startTwenty minutes of moist heat leaves raw-tasting onion. Slice them thin, or soften them in a little butter before laying them over the steak.
- Grated cheeseThe recipe does not say which. Parmesan or a dry factory cheese would both suit: Parmesan browns cleanly under the heat, while a young cheddar will loosen into oil. Finish under the broiler for two or three minutes rather than waiting for the oven to colour it.
- Baking tinUse a shallow pan or a small roasting dish, not a deep casserole — the surface needs to be exposed for the last stage to brown at all.
- YieldNo size or weight is given, so the number served depends entirely on the steak chosen. Total oven time is about fifty minutes plus browning; rest the meat briefly before slicing across the grain.
Haru Onuki was a Japanese soprano who built a career on American concert and vaudeville stages in the 1910s, and she is among the performers included in Mabel Rowland's Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916), a collection of dishes solicited from working stage performers. Her contribution is a good example of what those books actually contain: not the exotic set-piece a reader might expect from the name at the top, but a straightforward oven-braised steak filed under the flattering heading "French Dainties", applying French labels to plain food. Her closing remark about the chafing dish is the more revealing line. The chafing dish was the great fad of turn-of-the-century American entertaining, cheap and portable and ideally suited to actors in boarding houses and hotel rooms; against that background, her stated preference for a great big stove stands out.