Hamburg Steak
Take a thick slice from the top of the round. Have the butcher put in with it a small piece of marrow. Pound the steak enough to loosen the small fibres, cut in convenient pieces for putting through the grinder, and remove any threads of tough fibre. These will sometimes collect in the teeth of the grinder, and may be easily removed with a fork. Put with the pieces of meat a small piece--what would amount to 2 teaspoonfuls--of the marrow and grind through with it, putting in at the last a small piece of stale bread or crust; this will clear all meat from the teeth of the chopper, and the small amount of crumbs will do no harm in the meat.
Add to the chopped meat a few drops of onion juice or kitchen bouquet, and pepper, but do not salt it until after it is cooked; it will be less tender and juicy if salted first. Toss it lightly with a silver fork to mix the seasoning in, and with the fork, or two forks, make it into cakes or flattened balls. This is easiest done on a shallow baking-dish (a granite pie-plate is good for the purpose). Do not pack the meat closely, or make it into cakes with the hands, but pack it only closely enough with the fork to make the balls hold in shape.
Have the pan very hot, as for broiling other steak, rub it with a piece of fat to prevent sticking and breaking the balls in turning. As soon as seared on the under side, turn with a spatula and cook the other side. They should be well browned on the outside and rare and juicy within. As soon as done lift with the spatula to a hot platter, make an incision with a knife in the centre of each ball, put a lump of butter in the place, sprinkle with salt, set in a hot oven for two minutes, and serve. Should there be any gravy in the pan, add 2 or 3 tablespoonfuls of boiling water, 2 tablespoonfuls of tomato catsup, a little salt, and a dash of paprika; stir briskly, and pour around the balls.
A careful, pre-food-processor method for hamburg steak, built entirely around keeping the grind loose so the cakes stay juicy. Almost every instruction here serves that one aim, and the technique still holds up.
- The hinge: never compress the meatThe whole recipe turns on handling the ground beef with forks and never packing it by hand. Compressed patties turn dense and springy; a loosely formed cake stays tender. If you use a modern food processor rather than a grinder, pulse briefly and in small batches, since the blade smears fat rather than cutting it.
- Top of the roundRound is very lean, which is presumably why the marrow is added, though two teaspoons of it is only a token amount of fat. If you are grinding your own and want a richer cake, chuck, or chuck with a little added beef fat, is an easier route than round plus marrow.
- MarrowTwo teaspoons of raw marrow from a cracked leg bone, ground in with the meat, supplies fat and a slight silkiness. Ask a butcher for marrow bones and scoop the raw marrow out with the handle of a spoon; roasted marrow will not distribute the same way.
- Kitchen bouquetA commercial browning-and-seasoning sauce of caramel colour and vegetable extracts, still sold under that name. A few drops is a flavour and colour tint only, not a substitute for searing.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion through a sieve. It seasons without leaving pieces that would break the cakes apart.
- Salting after cookingThe advice is sound and now well explained: salt mixed into raw ground beef dissolves muscle proteins and gives the cooked patty a bouncy, sausage-like bite. Salt the surface just before or just after cooking instead.
- Granite pie-plateGranite ware is enamelled steel. Any shallow metal tray works for forming the cakes; the point is to shape them where they lie rather than lifting and handling them.
- Pan heat and donenessPreheat a heavy skillet until a drop of water skitters, then grease it lightly. Note that ground beef carries surface bacteria through the whole patty, so the "rare and juicy within" finish is not advised for children, older adults, pregnant women or anyone immunocompromised; 160F throughout is the current guidance for ground meat.
- The finishing ovenThe recipe says only 'a hot oven' and gives no temperature; two minutes is all it needs, just long enough to melt the butter into the cut you have made in each cake.
Hamburg steak reached American tables through mid-nineteenth-century German immigration and the transatlantic shipping lines out of Hamburg, and by the later nineteenth century it was appearing on restaurant menus and was often recommended to invalids and dyspeptics as beef made digestible by chopping. Compilations like this one treat it as a plain meat dish rather than a sandwich; the bun-borne hamburger appears to have been a separate development at fairs and lunch counters around the turn of the century, though its origins are disputed, and cookbooks were slow to acknowledge it. Home grinding of this kind was being urged at a time of widespread suspicion about prepared chopped meat, a concern that ran through American food writing in the years around the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.