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Broiled Beef Steak
The best steaks are cut thick. Have broiler very het. Brush with butter or fat from steak. Put on steak, turn over and sear on both sides. Turn often and broil or cook according to taste. Some like steak rare, others well done. Have platter on stove with butter, pepper and salt. Take steak from broiler and put in warm platter. Turn several times to season thoroughly, serve with French fried potatoes. Garnish with parsley and slices of lemon. There are many ways of serving steak. Oysters can be put on steak and run in oven until they curl. Mushroom sauce, onions sauted in butter are nice with steak. If a less expensive steak, such as round steak is used, sprinkle with vinegar before cooking. Also lemon juice makes it tender. Slash and broil as above. Steak garnishes are bananas, potatoes, mushrooms, tomatoes.
Mrs. Wilson is describing a gridiron or an overhead broiler at full blast, and almost everything that matters here is heat management. The instructions are loose by design, so the useful work is in pinning down the numbers.
- The hinge: a fully preheated broilerThe line "have broiler very hot" is the whole recipe. Give a gas or electric broiler a full 10 minutes on high with the pan in place, or let charcoal burn down to ash-grey coals, so the surface sears on contact rather than steaming in its own juices.
- "Cut thick" means about 1 1/2 inches"Cut thick" probably means an inch or more -- the recipe gives no measurement. Cookbooks of the period commonly call for steaks of roughly one to two inches for broiling. A thin supermarket steak under half an inch will overcook before it browns and is better suited to a hot skillet.
- Turn often, and use a thermometerFrequent turning is sound and has been reconfirmed by modern testing; it cooks more evenly than one flip. Judge doneness at 125F for rare, 130-135F for medium rare, 145F for medium, taken at the thickest part away from bone.
- The heated platterWarming a platter on the stove with butter, salt and pepper is a seasoning step and a resting step at once. A metal or heavy ceramic platter held at 150-200F in the oven does the same job; give the steak 5 to 8 minutes there before serving.
- Oysters "until they curl"Two minutes at most under a hot broiler. The curling edge is the signal, and anything past it turns them tough and watery.
- Vinegar and lemon on round steakAcid softens only the outer few millimetres and will not turn round steak into sirloin. Thirty to sixty minutes is the practical limit before the surface goes grey and mealy; the slashing she calls for does more good, as it cuts the long connective fibres.
- The banana garnishFried or broiled banana alongside beef turns up in other cookbooks of the period, so it is not an error in the text. Lemon slices and parsley were common trim for broiled meats at the time.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. A 1 1/2-inch steak of 1 1/2 to 2 lb would serve three to four, carved across the grain in thick slices.
Broiling was the prestige treatment for beef in American cookery long before the domestic gas broiler arrived, and this entry sits at the moment of changeover: the language of the gridiron survives while the appliance underneath it has become a metal box you preheat. Mrs. Wilson wrote her cook book in the years around the First World War, when she was a well-known Philadelphia food authority and wartime household adviser, and the frugal instinct shows through plainly at the end, where round steak is slashed and sprinkled with acid to bring a cheap cut within reach of the same method. The hot seasoned platter is an old technique, though its origin is not securely documented; butter, salt and pepper melting under a resting steak served as the only sauce it needed. The optional finishes she lists, oysters, mushroom sauce, sauted onions, appear widely in restaurant and hotel steak service of the day, offered as a menu of choices rather than a fixed recipe.