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Cooking of True Proteids Continued: Meat: Broiled
BROILED SIRLOIN STEAK Choose a small steak with tenderloin on one side, and have it cut one inch and a quarter thick. Wipe it carefully with a cloth wrung out of cold water, and cut off the flank end and any excess of fat. Heat the broiler. Rub the wires of the broiler with a bit of the fat, then put in the steak, having the rim of fat towards the open front of the broiler, that when the meat is held over the coals the melting fat may run down upon it, to baste it. Place the meat over and near the coals; let cook ten seconds, then turn, to cook the other side ten seconds; repeat for three minutes, then move the steak farther from the coals and cook from eight to ten minutes. Remove to a hot platter, and spread over the meat Maitre d' Hotel Butter. (See page 196.) BROILED LAMB CHOPS Prepare and cook as above, except shorten the whole time of cooking to from six to twelve minutes, according to the thickness of the chops. BROILED BEEF CAKES Put a small piece of steak, cut from the top of the round, upon a board; with a dull knife scrape the meat pulp from the connective tissue on one side, then turn and scrape the pulp from the other side, leaving the white fibrous mass on the board. Season the pulp with salt, mix thoroughly, then shape into small, flat cakes. Broil these in a hot, well-oiled broiler. Keep the edge of the cakes as thick as the center, or it will dry out too much in cooking. These required but a few minutes' broiling. They may also be pan-broiled. PAN - BROILED BEEF CAKES Have a cast-iron frying pan very, very hot; rub it over with a bit of fat, but leave no fat in the pan; put in the cakes, turn as soon as the outside is seared a little, keep the pan very hot, and keep turning the meat, until the outside is browned somewhat. Set on a hot platter and season as steak. PAN - BROILED MUTTON CHOPS Prepare the frying pan as above, and cook the chops in the same manner as the beef cakes. Cook from six to eight minutes, according to thickness. The outside should be brown, the center juicy and slightly red. If the chops are from a young creature, cook a little longer and do not leave the center red. HAMBURG STEAK A LA TARTARE Scrape the pulp from the nerves and fibers of a pound of choice round or rump steak and chop the pulp with one-fourth a pound of beef marrow very fine. Chop fine half a green pepper-pod and a slice of onion; cook these in a tablespoonful of hot butter until yellowed and softened; do not brown them. Add these to the meat and marrow with half a teaspoonful of salt, mix thoroughly, then shape into four balls; press the balls into flat cakes with a depression in the center. Rub over the bottom of a hot, iron frying pan with a bit of suet, then put in the meat, and break the yolk of an egg into the depression in each; baste the yolks with a little melted butter and set the frying pan into the oven; let the meat and eggs cook about five minutes, then remove them to a hot serving-dish, pour over a cup and a half of hot, brown or tomato sauce, and serve at once.
This will serve three or four people.
These are gridiron instructions written for a coal fire, and the method translates cleanly to a modern broiler or a heavy pan once you know what the vessel was. The one thing to carry over intact is the rapid ten-second turning at the start: it builds a crust without driving the juices out, and it works just as well over gas or charcoal.
- What "the broiler" means hereA double-sided wire broiler with a handle, held over live coals with the meat clamped inside so it can be flipped whole. Modern equivalents are a hinged grill basket over charcoal, a grill grate, or an overhead oven broiler on its highest setting with the rack close to the element for the first three minutes, then lowered.
- The fat rim faces the firePositioning the strip of fat toward the open front so the drippings run back over the steak is real basting, not decoration. Do not trim the fat cap flush; leave a quarter inch.
- Ten seconds a side, then back offThree minutes of constant turning close to the heat, then eight to ten minutes farther away. On a 1 1/4-inch sirloin the full time will take the steak to medium or beyond by modern reckoning; if you want medium-rare, work to an internal temperature of 130-135F and expect to pull the steak before the book's time is up.
- Scraped meat pulpThe beef cakes and the Hamburg steak both call for scraping pulp off the connective tissue with a dull knife, leaving the white fibers behind. It is a technique associated with very finely divided beef, and cookbooks of the period recommend it. Freshly ground chuck or round from the butcher gives a close result; scraping is worth doing only if you want the very fine, almost pasty texture the original had in mind.
- Beef marrowA quarter pound of marrow to a pound of meat is a fat enrichment, and marrow bones from a butcher will supply it. Substituting an equal weight of beef suet or simply using 80/20 ground beef achieves the same purpose.
- Oven heat for the Hamburg steakNo temperature is given; the recipe assumes a hot range oven. A modern 400-425F is a reasonable reading. Note that the cakes are not seared first -- they go into the hot greased pan, the yolks are added immediately, and the whole thing goes into the oven -- so five minutes is a very short cooking time and the pan must go in genuinely hot.
- Maître d'hôtel butterThe cross-reference is to softened butter worked with lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt and pepper, chilled and sliced onto the hot steak. Any modern compound butter serves.
- YieldThe sirloin as described feeds two, in keeping with the book's premise. The Hamburg steak makes four cakes and the author says three or four servings; halve it for two, using one egg yolk per cake.
Cooking for Two belongs to the Boston Cooking School tradition, and this chapter's title gives away its intellectual frame: meat is filed under "true proteids," the language of turn-of-the-century food chemistry, when household cookery was being rewritten as applied nutrition. The scraped-pulp technique that appears in two of these recipes came out of that same world of dietetic and invalid cookery, where finely divided beef was thought easiest to digest; it is often said to lie behind both Salisbury steak and the American hamburger patty, though the lineage is contested. "Hamburg steak" itself is generally traced to the beef preparations of Hamburg carried to the United States by German immigrants in the nineteenth century, and the addition of " he raraw egg yolk rather than any relation to modern steak tartare, since this version goes into a hot oven. The instructions to broil over coals and to heat a cast-iron pan "very, very hot" record a kitchen in transition, when a coal range and its gridiron were still the default but the frying pan was already the practical answer for two people.