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Cooking of True Proteids Continued: Meat: Prepare
PLAIN HAMBURG STEAK Prepare the meat as in the preceding recipe, or, pass the beef through a meat chopper; add the salt and, if approved, a little onion juice and mix thoroughly. Press the meat (this may be done nicely on a meat board) closely together into a flat, oval shape about three-fourths of an inch thick. Be careful to have the edges just as thick as the center. Heat the broiler and rub the inside of the wires with a bit of fat. Loosen the meat from the board with a spatula, then set it in place in the broiler. Cook about eight minutes. In the gas oven turn once. Over bright coals turn each ten seconds for half the time, then turn each two minutes. Spread with maitre d' hotel butter, page 196, or pour a cup of tomato or brown sauce over the meat on the platter. BROILED CHICKEN Cut the fowl down the back and through the breast. One of these pieces (half a chicken) will be enough for a family of two. Disjoint the wings and legs. Prepare the broiler as for beefsteak; put in the chicken and broil on the flesh side, three or four minutes (the skin on the other side will hold back the juice), then turn and broil on the skin side about one minute; repeat until the chicken is well marked with the wires of the broiler. Put the chicken into a baking pan, on a rack, and pour in half a cup of broth or hot water; baste the chicken thoroughly with melted butter, and let cook in the oven about twenty minutes, basting every five minutes. Serve with mashed potato, asparagus, hot or cold, and tomato salad.
BROILED BACON Bacon may be broiled over a rather dull fire, but with a loss of fat, which is of value. To avoid this waste, the cooking may be done in the oven. Lay the bacon, cut in very thin slices, on the wires of a double broiler, close the broiler and set it into a moderate oven over a dripping pan. Let cook until the bacon is delicately browned and crisp, then serve at once. This is one of the simplest and best ways of cooking bacon. That the bacon cook evenly, it must be sliced evenly. Lay the strip, skin side down, on a meat board, then with a strong, sharp, thin-bladed knife cut in slices as thin as possible, one after another, down to the rind; then run the knife between the slices and the rind, thus detaching them all together. Store the strip in a cool, dry place, that it may not mould and, also, that it may be sliced more readily. WHEN A FRIEND COMES TO DINNER If you use a gas range (in which things may be browned uniformly and very easily) try Planked Chops some day when a friend is to come home with your husband to dinner. This will not be when you first essay housekeeping, but after you have learned how to broil chops and make a dish of mashed potatoes, without fret or worry. The dealer will "French" the chops for you, but by the time you decide to make this dish, scraping the flesh from the rib bones of four chops will not seem a great under-taking. The feature of the pounded bacon and bread crumbs may be omitted.
Do not set the plank, when everything is in place upon it, too near the gas burner in the lower oven of your range. Do not hurry the browning of the potatoes and turn the plank, as needed, to color them uniformly. If the chops be underdone, at first, they will come out just right. Serve lettuce or celery salad with them, and finish with some sort of a sweet that you have made in the early morning and a cup of coffee.
LAMB CHOPS, PLANKED Select four rib-chops and trim the meat from the bones, French fashion. Pound four slices of bacon, cooked crisp, to a powder; brush the chops lightly with bacon fat or melted butter, then roll them in the powdered bacon and then in soft bread crumbs (sifted). Broil the chops in a well-oiled broiler, leaving them a little under done. Have ready a cup of cooked peas, made hot and buttered, and about a pint and a half of mashed potato. Make a mound of potato on a hot, chop plank, set the chops against this and pipe the rest of the potato around them. Beat the yolk of an egg; add a tablespoonful of milk and with it brush over the piping of potato. Set the plank into the oven, to brown the edges of the potato and make all hot. To serve, set the plank on a chop plate, put frills on the ends of the bones and the peas between the chops and potato. This is to serve two or four individuals.
SIRLOIN STEAK EN CASSEROLE, RATHSKELLER STYLE There is no object in cooking a choice sirloin steak in a casserole, for a round steak costing much less will give better results, from the fact that it contains more juice. On bills of fare in fine restaurants, we note the dishes, sirloin and tenderloin steaks, en casserole; but the cooking is not done in the covered casserole; the steaks are pan-broiled and then served in low, open casseroles in which they are easily carved.
For a sirloin steak large enough to serve three persons, make ready three or four small onions and a dozen, each, of raw carrot and potato balls. Cook these in a little hot fat, in a frying pan, until they are well browned on all sides, then cook in a pint or more of beef broth until they are tender; keep the vegetables hot. Melt three tablespoonfuls of butter and stir and cook until it becomes well browned, but not in the least burned; add four tablespoonfuls of flour and half a teaspoonful of salt and cook until it is also thoroughly browned, then set aside to become cold. When cold add a cup and a half of the broth in which the vegetables were cooked and stir until the mixture boils, then add the vegetables (also half a dozen or more of button mushrooms if convenient) and let stand in a dish of hot water until the steak is ready. Also heat a low, beefsteak casserole. Rub over the bottom of a very hot iron frying pan with a bit of suet, lay in the steak to cook one minute, then turn and cook the other side one minute and continue cooking and turning for six minutes, then transfer the steak to the hot casserole, season with salt and pour over it the sauce with vegetables; set the dish into the oven to remain about three minutes, then serve as above.
Five short meat recipes written for a coal or early gas range, where the "broiler" was a hinged wire cage that held the food between two grids and was set over the fire or under the flame. Nearly every adjustment here comes from translating that hardware.
- The double broilerThe wire broiler that appears in all these recipes is a hinged basket, oiled and preheated, that lets you flip the food and the cage together. A modern equivalent is a preheated cast-iron grill pan or an oven broiler with the rack about 4 inches from the element; turn with tongs rather than flipping a cage.
- Oven temperatures"Moderate oven," the only oven description the book gives, and only for the bacon, is usually read as about 350-375F. The book states no temperature for the chicken's twenty-minute finish or for browning the planked chops; something around 400-425F is a modern guess at what will color the potato piping without drying the meat.
- Hamburg steak donenessEight minutes on a three-quarter-inch patty of freshly ground beef gives roughly medium. Commercially ground beef today comes from many animals and should reach 160F throughout, which on a patty this thick is close to the same timing; a thermometer settles it.
- The coal-fire turning schedule"Turn each ten seconds for half the time" is not fussiness. Frequent early turning over live coals sears both faces evenly and keeps the surface from scorching before the center cooks. It works on a hot grill pan too, and cooks more evenly than a single flip.
- Broiled chickenThe broiling fowl of this period was a small bird, a couple of pounds or so, well under the size of a supermarket chicken today; a modern half bird will probably need longer than twenty minutes in the oven. Cook until the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F, basting as directed.
- Bacon slicing and storageThe instruction to slice a whole slab down to the rind assumes unsliced, heavily salted bacon kept in a cool larder. Today's bacon is mildly cured and must be refrigerated; the oven method at 350F on a rack over a sheet pan is still the cleanest way to cook it.
- Planked chopsA plank is an untreated hardwood board, oiled and heated with the food on it. "Frenched" chops have the rib bone scraped clean, which any butcher will still do. A pint and a half of mashed potato is about 3 cups, piped around the chops.
- "En casserole" hereA beefsteak casserole in this book is a low, open, ovenproof serving dish, not a covered baking dish or a stew. The steak is pan-broiled first, and the casserole only holds it hot under the sauce for three minutes.
- The brown rouxBrowning the butter, then the flour and salt, then cooling the roux before adding the broth is the classic method for a lump-free brown sauce; a temperature difference between roux and liquid is the usual explanation, though steady whisking matters as much. Four tablespoons flour to a cup and a half of broth gives a very thick gravy, so thin with more of the vegetable broth to taste.
- YieldsEach recipe is scaled small: half a chicken feeds two, the planked chops "two or four," the sirloin en casserole three. The Hamburg steak gives no yield.
These pages come from a domestic-science era cookbook aimed at the small household, and the framing essay, "When a Friend Comes to Dinner," tells you exactly who the reader was imagined to be: a new wife with a gas range, learning to broil a chop before attempting anything showy. Hamburg steak had entered American cookbooks in the later nineteenth century as chopped beefsteak, generally traced to the German port whose emigrants carried it across the Atlantic, and it was recommended in this period as an easily digested form of beef for invalids and children as much as a dinner dish. Planked meat and fish, cooked and served on a heated hardwood board, was a restaurant flourish of the 1890s and 1900s that home cooks copied with piped mashed potato borders. "Rathskeller style" borrows the name of the German-American basement beer restaurant, and the author's aside is worth noting for what it reveals about menu language: she points out that the fashionable "en casserole" of fine restaurants meant the dish it arrived in, not the way it was cooked.