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Nude Ranch or Sally Rand Special
Get finely chopped sirloin steak, not ground round, let it stand in icebox or cold place 2 hours in marinating mixture of lemon juice, hot pepper sauce, chopped onions, garlic, diced tomato, salt and Tabasco. Hand it out raw and cold with sliced tomatoes, Bermuda onions, and canned chili peppers (the sauce of which has been used for marinating).
Males go for raw meat and such hot stuff.
This is a steak tartare dressed up as a novelty item, and the reason it cannot be recommended as printed has nothing to do with taste and everything to do with the handling of raw chopped beef.
- Raw chopped beef, never cookedNothing in this dish is ever brought to a temperature that kills pathogens. Whole muscle carries bacteria on its surface; the moment it is chopped, that surface is distributed throughout the mass, which is why chopped and ground beef is the classic vehicle for E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella. A dish of raw chopped beef requires meat cut to order from a whole piece by someone who knows it is going to be eaten raw, and even then it is not a risk-free proposition.
- The marinade does not sterilise anythingLemon juice, Tabasco and chilli sauce flavour the meat and slightly denature its surface. They do not pasteurise it. Acid marinades have no reliable effect on the bacterial load in raw beef, and the belief that they do is one of the more persistent kitchen myths.
- "Icebox or cold place, 2 hours"An icebox held whatever temperature the ice happened to give it, often well above 40F, and a "cold place" is not a temperature at all. Two hours of raw chopped beef at an unspecified temperature, then handed out cold, is precisely the window in which bacterial growth becomes the problem.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for steak tartare from a source that specifies the cut, the sourcing and the handling. Do not follow the timings here.
- Sirloin, not ground roundThe distinction the author draws is worth noting, though no reason is given for it. Commercial grinding did commonly combine trimmings from more than one animal, whereas a piece of sirloin chopped by hand comes from one identifiable cut; whether that was the author's thinking or simply a preference about texture and fat, the text does not say.
- Bermuda onionsA large, flat, mild sweet onion, common in American markets through the mid-twentieth century. Vidalia, Walla Walla or any mild sweet onion stands in for it.
- Canned chili peppersMid-century canned chillies were often mild green chillies packed in a thin spiced liquid, though hotter and pickled products were also sold, so the heat here is uncertain. The recipe explicitly reuses the packing liquid in the marinade, which is sound thinking about not wasting flavour.
Sally Rand was the fan dancer who made her name at Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress exposition and went on to run the "Nude Ranch" concession at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco — a Western-themed sideshow of young women in hats and gun belts and not much else. Naming a plate of raw meat after her is exactly the register of the mid-century outdoor cooking book, a genre that sold barbecue to suburban men as a slightly transgressive escape from the indoor kitchen, complete with joke titles and assurances about what "males go for." The dish itself is a version of steak tartare, which reached American chafing-dish and buffet cookery from European restaurant menus, though the name is not securely documented before the early twentieth century; the chilli, Tabasco and canned peppers are the American addition.