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Steak En Casserole
3 tablespoons butter or other fat 3 tablespoons flour 2 cups stock Salt Parsley Pepper Turnip balls Carrot balls Potato balls Small onions 2 pounds of 1 1/2-inch steak Make a brown sauce of the fat, flour, stock and seasoning. Add balls of turnip, carrot, potato and onions, which have been previously cooked in a little brown stock until tender. For each person, allow a half-dozen little balls of each of these vegetables and two small onions. Keep this sauce hot while you pan-broil the steak until about half done, then transfer steak to heated casserole, pour vegetables and sauce over steak, cover, and place in oven (350 degrees F.) until steak is sufficiently cooked. When ready to serve, sprinkle the steak with finely chopped parsley.
A pan-seared steak finished in a covered dish under brown sauce and turned vegetables. The whole thing hangs on how far you take the searing, since the oven stage keeps cooking the meat.
- Read the doneness backwardsPan-broil only until the outside is well browned and the centre still cool, then let the covered oven stage bring it up. A 1 1/2-inch steak needs roughly 15-20 minutes at 350F under sauce to reach 130-135F for medium rare; pull it by thermometer rather than by the clock.
- "Casserole" here is the dishA lidded baking dish that goes into the oven and comes to the table, not a saucepan and not a layered bake. Heat it first, as directed, or the sauce drops the meat's temperature the moment it goes in.
- Cut choiceSirloin or a thick top round takes this treatment best. Rib eye or strip is wasted on it, since 20 minutes under moist heat undoes the point of a tender cut, and a true braising cut such as chuck will not become tender in that time either.
- The vegetable ballsCut them with a melon baller from peeled turnip, carrot and potato. They are simmered separately in brown stock until barely tender before they go into the sauce; if you cook them through there, the potato balls will collapse in the oven.
- Brown sauce and brown stockThe sauce is a plain brown roux sauce: cook the butter and flour together to a nut colour before adding the stock. Where the recipe calls for brown stock for the vegetables, ordinary beef stock will do.
- Quantities do not quite meetTwo pounds of steak and two cups of sauce serve four, but the vegetable allowance given per person is generous. Six balls each of three vegetables plus two onions per person means about a pound and a half of trimmed vegetables for four, which is more than two cups of sauce will coat comfortably. Either scale the sauce up by half or cut the vegetables back.
- ServingBring the dish to the table covered, and add the chopped parsley only after the lid is off; it dulls immediately in steam. Carve the steak across the grain into thick slices and spoon vegetables and sauce over each portion.
New Delineator Recipes came out of the home-making and cookery side of The Delineator, the Butterick pattern company's women's magazine, and its casserole chapter reflects a genuine fashion of the 1920s for covered-dish cookery: a lidded vessel that went from oven to table saved a serving dish, saved reheating, and suited households with less domestic help than a generation earlier. The little turned vegetables belong to an older and grander tradition of French vegetable garnish, in which root vegetables were pared into uniform balls or olives so that a plate looked composed rather than merely fed. That a mass-circulation magazine expected its readers to own a vegetable scoop and use it on turnip, carrot and potato alike says a good deal about how far restaurant presentation had travelled into the American home kitchen by the late twenties.