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Broiled Beefsteak
Use a slice cut from the rump, round, or sirloin, cut one and one half inches to two and a half inches thick. Wipe meat; place on hot broiler, and broil over a clear fire from five to ten minutes, turning every ten seconds. Serve on a hot platter, spread with butter, and season with salt and pepper.
If there is a large amount of fat on the steak, be sure it is well browned before serving.
Beefsteak smothered in Onions 1 dozen small onions 1 slice porterhouse steak, cut thick salt pepper Heat a frying pan hissing hot. Put in beefsteak, searing first on one side, then on the other; cook five minutes; season with salt and pepper; add onions which have been cooked one half hour in boiling salted water. Cover and simmer twenty or thirty minutes.
Remove steak to platter, spread with butter, and season with salt and pepper. Season onions with salt, pepper and butter, and serve around steak.
Two methods on one page: a fast broil over live coals, and a slow braise in the pan. The first translates cleanly to a modern grill or broiler; the second needs a re-think about which cut goes into it.
- "Broiler" means a gridironIn 1907 this was a hinged wire grid held over the open coals of a range firebox, not a drawer under a gas flame. The nearest equivalents are a charcoal grill or a heavy cast-iron grill pan; an overhead broiler works but should be preheated a full ten minutes with the rack close to the element.
- Turning every ten secondsFrequent turning over intense heat is generally held to cook a thick steak more evenly and to reduce the grey band under the crust, and some modern testing supports the practice, though ten-second intervals are unusually rapid. It suits a steak at least 1.5 inches thick, as specified.
- Five to ten minutes is for rareA 1.5-inch steak turned constantly over a hot fire will reach rare in about that time; a 2.5-inch steak will not. Go by internal temperature: 125F for rare, 130-135F medium rare, taken at the centre away from bone.
- The cuts have shiftedRump and round today are lean and sinewy and are poor candidates for dry broiling. Sirloin, ribeye, strip or a thick porterhouse behave as the recipe expects.
- Season at the end, or well aheadThe book salts after cooking, which keeps the surface dry for browning. Salting 40 minutes or more in advance works equally well; salting five minutes before broiling is the one timing that draws surface moisture and hinders the crust.
- Rest before servingNeither method mentions it. Five to ten minutes on the hot platter before cutting keeps the juices in the meat rather than on the plate.
- The smothered version wants a different steakTwenty to thirty minutes of covered simmering will take a porterhouse well past well-done. That braise suits a thick chuck or blade steak, or shorten it drastically if you insist on the porterhouse called for.
- The onionsA dozen small onions means whole boiling onions, roughly golf-ball size — somewhere around 1 to 1.5 lb. Half an hour in boiling salted water leaves them soft before they ever meet the pan, so the covered simmer is mostly about the steak.
- YieldThe book gives no weight or serving count; a single thick steak of this kind will generally serve two to three.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of many turn-of-the-century cookbooks published by a food business as advertising, with the sponsor's product woven through the sweets chapters and the rest of the book straight domestic-science instruction in the New England style. The broiling directions here belong to that world: a coal or wood range with a firebox you could open, and a cook who judged "a clear fire" by eye rather than by dial. The two recipes together might be read as suggesting something about the economics of American meat cookery of the period. A thick steak broiled over coals and finished with nothing but butter, salt and pepper was the expensive way; smothering in onions, with its long covered simmer, was arguably the treatment that made a cheaper or tougher piece palatable.