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Steak En Casserole
2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter I onion 3 tablespoonfuls brown sauce 1 tablespoonful chopped pickles 1/2 cupful diced fried bacon 10 small mushrooms (canned) I diced cooked carrot I diced cooked potato 1 teaspoonful meat extract A few small fried potatoes Salt and pepper Cut the steak into six neatly shaped flat pieces, and season them with salt and pepper. Fry them slightly on one side in a little of the butter, over a quick fire, and set them aside.
Peel the onion and chop it finely, fry it in a small stewpan in one tablespoonful of the butter to a golden color, moisten with the brown sauce and a little of the mushroom liquor. Boil up, and add the pickles, bacon, mushrooms, carrot, and potato. Heat up these and put them in a casserole, place the meat on the top, add the meat extract, dissolved, cover and cook in the oven for twenty minutes.
Serve hot in the casserole, with the fried potatoes placed on the top.
A straightforward braise in miniature: seared steak set over a garnish of vegetables, bacon and mushrooms, finished in the oven. The ingredient list omits the steak itself, which is the first thing to sort out.
- The missing steakThe list names everything but the meat. Six neat flat pieces suggests a tender cut — sirloin, rump or fillet trimmings — though the recipe gives neither weight nor thickness. This is a quick oven finish, not a long braise, so a chuck or shin cut will be tough in twenty minutes.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven temperature, only 'the oven'; a moderate heat, around 350F, suits it. Everything in the pot is already cooked or nearly so, and the twenty minutes is there to marry the sauce and finish the steak, not to tenderise it.
- Brown sauceThree tablespoonfuls of espagnole or a plain roux-thickened beef gravy, made in advance — this book expects it on hand. A reduced beef stock thickened with a little beurre manié does the same job and gives about the right body.
- Meat extractBovril, Liebig's or a similar concentrated beef extract, dissolved in a spoonful of hot water. A teaspoon is a seasoning, not a stock cube's worth of liquid; add it at the end so the salt does not concentrate further in the oven.
- Mushroom liquorThe brine from the can of mushrooms is used deliberately to loosen the sauce. If you use fresh mushrooms instead, sauté them with the onion and moisten with stock, since there will be no liquor.
- PicklesChopped pickles here means sharp cucumber pickle or gherkins, and they are what keeps the dish from tasting flat. Add them off the boil so they keep some bite.
- Searing on one sideThe steak is browned on one side only before it goes into the casserole; the recipe does not say which side faces up. Keep the pan properly hot for that first side.
- The casseroleA casserole of this date means a lidded earthenware or fireproof pot brought straight to the table. Any covered 2-quart braiser works, but preheating it before the vegetables go in keeps the twenty-minute timing honest.
- YieldSix pieces, so six servings. The fried potatoes go on at the last moment or they steam soft under the lid.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to the casserole appeared in English on both sides of the Atlantic in the years just before the First World War, when fireproof earthenware made it practical to cook and serve in the same vessel. The appeal was partly economy of fuel and washing-up and partly fashion: the covered pot arriving at table was understood as French and modern. The word itself is simply the French for a pan or stewpot, and in books of this date it still means the dish rather than the mixture inside it. The recipe's structure — a garnish of diced cooked root vegetables, bacon, mushrooms and a spoonful of espagnole — is straight out of professional hotel practice, where such things sat ready in the larder; the household cook was presumably expected to have made her brown sauce earlier in the week, and the tin of mushrooms and the jar of meat extract stood in for what a restaurant kitchen would have drawn from its stockpot.