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Beefsteak en Casserole
Melt three tablespoons of butter, add six onions cut in slices and cook until light brown. Put the onions into the casserole, rinsing out the pan with a little hot water. Cut two pounds of beef cut from the top of the round into pieces for serving and sear in a hot omelet pan.
Put into the casserole on top of the onions, with a sprig of parsley, salt and pepper and enough hot water to cover the onions. Cover and cook slowly for two hours or until nearly tender. Skim off the fat, add one cup of sliced potatoes which have been parboiled, and more seasonings if needed. Serve from casserole. -Stella A. Downing.
A plain braise of round steak on a bed of browned onions, of the kind that carried a household through a cheap cut. Little needs changing beyond knowing what the vessel and the pan were.
- What "casserole" means hereIn a 1900s American cookbook the casserole is the vessel itself: a lidded earthenware or enameled pot brought to the table, not a baked dish of layered food. A Dutch oven or any heavy lidded pot of 4-5 quarts does the same work.
- Cook slowly means lowTwo hours of gentle cooking with the liquid barely trembling. The recipe does not say whether the casserole sits on the stove or goes into the oven; either works so long as the heat stays low. A rolling simmer will tighten the meat fibers and leave the beef stringy rather than tender.
- The omelet panAn omelet pan of the period was a shallow, heavy-bottomed skillet, often iron. Any heavy skillet will sear the beef; the point is a hot dry surface and enough room that the pieces brown instead of steam.
- Deglazing, in period language"Rinsing out the pan with a little hot water" is deglazing. Do the same after searing the beef so the browned fond goes into the pot rather than down the sink.
- Top of the roundA lean, well-worked cut that still exists under the same name. 'Pieces for serving' means portion-sized pieces, cut across the grain. It has almost no internal fat, which is why the long slow cook and the covering liquid matter.
- Six onionsSix medium yellow onions, roughly 2 pounds sliced, is the likely sense of it. They collapse into the braising liquid and are most of the sauce.
- The potatoes go in lastParboiled slices added at the end need only a further 15-30 minutes to finish. Added at the start they would disintegrate and cloud the liquid.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef plus potatoes serves four generously, five at a stretch with bread.
Recipes signed with a contributor's name, as this one is, were a staple of the period's magazine kitchen pages and community cookbooks: readers sent in dishes and the collected results were printed and bound up. The dish itself is a beef braise of the most ordinary kind, but its title reflects a genuine vogue of the 1900s and 1910s for French-named casserole cookery, when glazed earthenware pots that could go from oven to table were newly fashionable in American homes and cooking "en casserole" carried a little continental prestige. What it actually describes is thrift: top of the round was a cheap cut, too lean and too tough to broil well, and the long covered cook over a bed of browned onions was a common American answer to that problem.