Meats: Steak
Hamburg Steak. a Two pounds round beef chopped fine; press it into a flat steak, sprinkle with salt and pepper and a little onion juice; flour lightly, and broil as beefsteak. Make a brown gravy with a little soup stock, thicken with flour, and pour around the steak.
Steak à la Bordelaise (French recipe). 1 sirloin steak, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 2 cupfuls beef stock, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 2 tablespoonfuls chopped raw ham, bay leaf, 1 tablespoonful chopped onion, Salt and pepper to taste, 1 tablespoonful tomato catsup, cupful finely chopped mushrooms.
Brown the butter and flour, stir in the stock; when thick and smooth, add the ham, bay leaf, and onion.
Two steak preparations run together on one page, the second of them cut off mid-instruction. Both assume a coal broiler and a stockpot already simmering on the back of the range.
- The Bordelaise recipe is incompleteThe verbatim text ends after the ham, bay leaf and onion go into the sauce; it never says when to add the catsup and mushrooms, how long to simmer, or how to cook the sirloin. Add the mushrooms and catsup with the other flavourings and simmer 15-20 minutes to reduce and lose the raw flour taste, then strain if you want it smooth.
- Ground beef and donenessThis is the one point that matters for the Hamburg steak. A whole steak is safe rare, but chopping distributes surface bacteria through the meat, so a ground-beef cake wants an internal 160F; grinding it yourself from a single whole piece lowers the risk but does not remove it. Two pounds pressed into one flat steak about an inch thick will need something like 6-8 minutes a side under a hot broiler -- go by a thermometer, not the clock.
- "Broil as beefsteak"In a coal-range kitchen this meant a hinged gridiron over live coals. Use a broiler element set as high as it goes with the meat 3-4 inches beneath it, or a cast-iron pan taken to the point of smoking; the flouring is there to build a crust, and it needs high heat to brown.
- Onion juiceA common nineteenth-century seasoning: grate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects, pressing the pulp in a sieve. A teaspoon is plenty for two pounds.
- Chopped raw hamThis means uncooked cured ham of the prosciutto or country-ham type, chopped small so it melts into the sauce. Supermarket cooked deli ham will not give the same salty depth; pancetta is the closest easy substitute.
- Beef stock"A little soup stock" for the Hamburg gravy points to a household that kept stock on hand. Half a cup of good unsalted stock thickened with a teaspoon of flour worked into the pan drippings is a workable proportion. If you use commercial stock, hold back the salt until the sauce has reduced.
- Missing quantityThe mushroom measure reads "cupful finely chopped mushrooms" with no fraction, apparently dropped somewhere between the original page and this text; a half cup suits two cups of stock, and a full cup makes a much heavier sauce.
- YieldTwo pounds of chopped round serves four to six. One sirloin steak with the Bordelaise sauce serves two to three, and the sauce quantity is generous enough for either dish.
History: Chopped-beef steak appears in American cookbooks and on menus as "Hamburg steak" from at least the 1880s, the name usually traced -- though the link is traditional rather than documented -- to the beef preparations German immigrants and the Hamburg-America shipping lines brought across the Atlantic. Note that it is treated here as a steak and not a sandwich: pressed into a single flat cake, broiled on the gridiron, and sauced with brown gravy, which is how the dish appeared on hotel and restaurant menus of the period; chopped beef was also widely recommended in the period's cookery and invalid-diet writing as easy to digest for dyspeptics. The Bordelaise beside it shows what an American household book of the era meant by a "French recipe" -- a classic sauce bordelaise is built on red wine and beef marrow, but this version substitutes stock, catsup and raw ham, the sort of adaptation that let a cook working from a domestic pantry claim the prestige of a French name.