Meats: Pour
Pour out the largest part of the fat, set the pan on top of the stove, add cupful flour, and stir it through the dripping until well browned. Pepper and salt to taste.
Add gradually from 1 to 2 cupfuls boiling water, and beat the gravy smooth with a wire spoon; if it is not rich enough in coloring, brown with teaspoonful kitchen bouquet.
Casserole of Beefsteak.
Sauté 3 sliced onions in a tablespoonful butter; put them into the casserole. Cut a steak, from the upper side of the round, into pieces suitable for one portion. Put them in the sauté pan and sear on all sides, then in the casserole. Add a tablespoonful flour to the sauté pan, let it brown, add 1½ cupfuls water, and stir until thickened, season with salt, pepper, and a tablespoonful chopped parsley. Add a little Worcestershire Sauce and mushroom catsup. The sauce will be richer if stock is used instead, of water. Pour the sauce over the meat, cover the casserole, set in the oven, and cook slowly until the meat is tender, then cover the top with parboiled, sliced potatoes, and return to the oven to finish cooking the potatoes. Serve in the casserole.
To Broil a Steak.
Two things run together on this page: the tail end of a pan-gravy method for a roast, and a complete braise of round steak. The gravy paragraph assumes you have just lifted a joint out of its roasting pan.
- The gravy is a fragmentIt begins with the drippings already in the pan, so read it as a continuation of a roasting recipe. Everything after "Casserole of Beefsteak" is a separate dish, and the trailing "To Broil a Steak" is the heading of the next one.
- "Cupful flour" is unreliableA cup of flour to 1 o.. The book prints measures without the article elsewhere ("teaspoonful kitchen bouquet"), so whether a fraction has dropped out in printing or the cupful is simply as written cannot be settled from the page. For pan gravy work to roughly 2 tablespoons flour and 2 tablespoons fat per cup of liquid.
- Wire spoonA period whisk. Any balloon whisk does the job, and the point of it is to break the flour into the fat before the liquid seizes.
- Kitchen BouquetA caramel-and-vegetable browning sauce still sold under that name. It adds colour, not much flavour; a teaspoon is plenty, and dark soy or a spoon of caramelised tomato paste does the same work.
- Casserole means the potHere it genuinely is a lidded ovenproof vessel, since the dish is served in it — a Dutch oven or covered earthenware braiser of about 3 quarts.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, not the sweet tomato condiment. Bottled mushroom ketchup is still made in Britain; a tablespoon of soy sauce plus a little Worcestershire approximates it.
- "Cook slowly" in the ovenThe book gives no temperature; a modern equivalent is somewhere around 300 325F. The upper side of the round is a working muscle and will want roughly 1 o 2 hours covered before it gives way; the sauce should barely tremble.
- The potatoesParboil the slices briefly and lay them on only at the end, as directed. The recipe does not say whether to uncover the casserole or change the oven heat for this stage; leaving the lid off for the last stretch will let them colour rather than steam.
- YieldThe book gives no weight, only pieces "suitable for one portion". A round steak of 2 to 2 2 pounds so cut would serve about four to six with the potatoes on top.
The dish belongs to the brief American vogue, around the turn of the twentieth century, for cooking and serving in the same earthenware pot. What sits underneath it is much older: a plain braise of a cheap, hard-worked cut, browned first for colour and then left in a low oven with thickened liquid until the connective tissue softens. The seasonings mark the period as clearly as the method. Worcestershire and mushroom catsup were among the bottled savoury correctives found in late-Victorian store cupboards, while Kitchen Bouquet supplied a deep brown colour.