Spanish Steak
A delicious dish can be made of a flank or rump steak. Cut off all the fat and fry it brown in plenty of butter, lift out and put in a baking pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and fry in sliced onion, brown in the butter remaining in the frying-pan. Spread onions over the steak and cover it with I can of tomatoes, juice and all.
Cover and bake an hour in a slow oven, basting frequently. Make gravy of drippings remaining in the pan and serve piping hot.
This is a braise dressed as a fried steak: the searing is only the first step, and the hour under tomato is what makes a flank or rump cut tender. A few conventions in the wording need translating.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no figures; a slow oven of the period is generally read as somewhere between 275F and 325F, so around 300F. The dish wants a bare simmer under its cover for the full hour; a hotter oven will tighten the meat before the connective tissue softens.
- "I can of tomatoes"A typographical 1. Canned tomatoes of the period usually came in a No. 2 can, roughly 20 oz, or a No. 3 at about 32 oz. A modern 28-oz can of whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand, is the right quantity for a 1.5 to 2 lb steak.
- Butter alone will burn"Plenty of butter" at searing heat scorches and blackens the fond you need for the gravy. Use half butter and half a neutral oil, or clarified butter, and get the pan properly hot before the meat goes in.
- Dry the meatFlank and rump both carry surface moisture that steams rather than browns. Pat dry and sear in a single uncrowded layer; the brown crust is the whole flavour base of the finished gravy.
- OnionsThe sentence is garbled but the sense is clear: soften and brown sliced onion in the butter left in the pan. No quantity is given. Let them go properly golden, not merely translucent.
- Basting under a lidWith the pan covered, basting matters less than the original suggests; opening it every fifteen minutes drops the temperature. Baste once or twice at most, or leave it alone entirely.
- The gravyThe pan liquid will be thin and tomato-heavy. Lift the meat out, rest it, and reduce the liquid hard on the stovetop, or whisk in a small beurre manie. Season at this stage, not before, since reduction concentrates the salt.
- CarvingFlank steak must be sliced thin and across the grain, on a slight bias. Cut with the grain and it will be stringy however long it braised. Rump is more forgiving.
- YieldA 1.5 to 2 lb steak treated this way serves four with rice, potatoes or bread to catch the sauce.
"Spanish" in American cookbooks of this era is often said to have meant not Spain but a shorthand for tomatoes, onions and peppers together, the same convention generally credited with giving us Spanish rice and Spanish omelet. Flank was among the cheapest cuts on the block, too tough to grill and generally sold for stewing, and a can of tomatoes cost very little once commercial canning had made them a year-round staple. The technique of browning a cheap cut hard and then letting it sit in acidic liquid in a cool oven is straightforward braising, and it was a common household answer to a tough piece of beef long before anyone marketed flank steak as desirable. Recipes of this type may well have been written with a coal or wood range in mind, where a slow oven was the residual heat left after the day's baking, so the hour of gentle cooking would have cost nothing extra in fuel.