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Broiled Beef Balls
With a knife, scrape from a piece of raw round steak as much as possible of the soft part of the meat. Dust with a very little salt and form into balls in the palm of the hand, but applying no more pressure than absolutely necessary. Cook for two minutes on a hot omelet pan, shaking the balls about so they will not stick.-E. M. K.
This is a fragment of nineteenth-century invalid cookery rather than a dinner dish, and the two-minute cooking time is the whole problem with it. The notes below explain the vocabulary and why the method does not transfer to a modern kitchen.
- Why the timing failsTwo minutes in a pan, with the balls rolled about so they colour on all sides, browns the outside and leaves the centre raw. Because the meat has been scraped apart and reassembled by hand, any bacteria that were on the cut surface of the steak are now distributed through the interior, where nothing reaches a killing temperature.
- The specific riskShiga toxin-producing E. coli, including O157:H7, is a surface contaminant on beef. Whole steaks can be served rare because searing handles the surface; anything comminuted -- ground, minced, or scraped and pressed into balls -- cannot, which is why current guidance puts ground beef at 160F throughout. Salmonella on beef is a lesser but real concern in the same way.
- "Scrape from a piece of raw round steak"Scraped beef is made by drawing a dull knife or spoon edge across the cut face of the meat, lifting off pulp and leaving connective tissue behind. It was a common way of producing tender minced beef before domestic mincers were widespread, and it was valued because it was gentle and lightly handled.
- "Hot omelet pan"An omelet pan of the period was typically a small, shallow, sloping-sided iron or steel pan kept smooth. Such pans were usually used with a little butter or fat, though this recipe calls for none. It is not a special vessel; the point of the instruction is a small hot surface, not a technique you cannot reproduce.
- "No more pressure than absolutely necessary"This is the one piece of the original worth keeping in mind generally: lightly formed beef stays tender, while compacted beef turns dense. It applies to any patty. It does not make undercooked scraped beef safe.
- No yield, no seasoning to speak ofThe original gives no quantity, no number of balls, and only "a very little salt." The scale points to a single small portion rather than a dish for a household at table. If you want lightly handled beef patties cooked to a modern standard, use a current recipe.
This is a scrap of invalid cookery, the branch of nineteenth-century domestic writing devoted to feeding the sick, the elderly and the very young. Scraped beef, beef tea, beef juice and raw or barely cooked minced beef were all part of the same theory: that red meat carried a concentrated "strength" which heat drove off, so the less cooking the better for a patient who could not digest much. Doctors of the period prescribed it freely, and cookbooks obliged -- a related impulse produced Salisbury steak, minced beef pressed into cakes and cooked briefly, promoted by the American physician James H. Salisbury, who advocated a minced-beef regimen from the 1860s onward. The initialled attribution, "E. M. K.", suggests a reader's or contributor's submission rather than editorial text, which would account for an instruction that reads like one cook telling another something she already half knows. Bacteriology caught up with the practice only slowly, and the later identification of foodborne pathogens in ground beef told against feeding lightly seared raw meat to the people least able to survive an infection.