Hamburg Steak
Grind lean beef, season with grated onion, pepper and salt. Make into small mounds an inch thick, put in hot spider, turn several times. Add a little butter, and when done make gravy by adding a little water and cook until thick. Nice with Creole sauce.
A bare-bones pan-fried patty from the era when a hand-cranked grinder was standard kitchen equipment. The only real technique here is the pan sauce built from the drippings.
- SpiderA spider was originally a long-handled cast-iron pan on three legs, meant to stand over coals; by 1920 the word simply meant a heavy frying pan. Cast iron or carbon steel is still the right choice, since the browning is the whole point.
- Lean beefGrind chuck rather than round if you are grinding your own. Ground meat labelled lean at 90 percent or better will need the butter the recipe adds; anything leaner turns dry and crumbly at this thickness.
- "Turn several times"Modern practice favours leaving a patty undisturbed until a crust forms, then flipping once. Repeated turning on hot cast iron does not ruin it, but it slows the crust and makes doneness harder to judge.
- DonenessGround beef should reach 160F throughout, since grinding distributes surface bacteria through the whole mass. An inch-thick mound in a hot pan takes roughly 8 to 10 minutes total.
- Butter timingAdd the butter near the end as the recipe directs. Introduced at the start it will brown and scorch before the meat is cooked through.
- The gravyWith no flour at all and very little fat, "cook until thick" means reducing the water and drippings to a glaze, not making a thickened gravy. A few tablespoons of water per patty, scraped up off the pan bottom, is the whole sauce.
- Creole sauceCreole sauce in books of this period is generally a tomato, onion and green pepper sauce, closer to a light stewed-tomato base than to anything hot. Any tomato-and-pepper sauce serves the same purpose here.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Reckon on 5 to 6 oz of meat per person, one grated small onion and about a teaspoon of salt per two pounds.
Hamburg steak reached American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, carried by German immigration and named for the port rather than for any single dish; the name is generally traced to the seasoned chopped beef sold to and by travellers through Hamburg. It spread quickly once domestic meat grinders became cheap, because it let a household turn tough, inexpensive cuts into something that ate like a steak. Mary A. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers in the years just after the First World War, when wartime meat conservation campaigns had made stretching and grinding a patriotic habit as much as an economy, and the extreme brevity of this entry suggests she assumed every reader already knew the dish and needed only the seasoning and the pan gravy spelled out.