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Steak Sauce
Dump plenty chili sauce out of the bottle into the frying pan and heat it up on a good bed of embers and ashes with the juice of a whole lemon, a lump of butter about the size of your pipe bowl and a few shakes of zigzag Tabasco lightning. Since in city restaurants when we feel splurgy we're apt to order a steak, so, in planning an outdoor feed, take a steak along-the kind depending on local taste and don't forget the spuds. Broiled Jack Dempsey or Delmonico steaks weighing 11/4 pounds, of which only 3 or 4 can be cut from a half of beef, or thick sirloins with hashed browned potatoes, is what folks go for in the East. Panfried corn-fed T-bones and baked spuds are preferred in the West, and such a steak makes its biggest hit when snowed under with onions.
This is really two things in one paragraph: a three-ingredient pan sauce, and the author's opinions on what steak to carry to camp. The sauce is the part with instructions.
- What "chili sauce" means hereNot sriracha or a Chinese chili paste. In American cookery of this period chili sauce is a thick, sweet-sour tomato condiment with onion, sweet pepper and vinegar, sold in bottles alongside ketchup. Heinz-style chili sauce is the direct equivalent; ketchup thinned with a little vinegar is a passable stand-in.
- Quantities, translated"Plenty" is unquantified. A pipe-bowl lump of butter is roughly a tablespoon; the juice of a whole lemon is 2 to 3 tablespoons, which will be assertive against a modest panful of sauce, so add half, taste, then add the rest.
- Heat it, don't cook it downThe sauce only needs to come to a bare simmer so the butter emulsifies and the lemon loses its raw edge. Two or three minutes is enough. Held over embers it reduces fast and turns sticky and oversweet.
- Embers and ashesThe instruction means a raked bed of coals that has burned past flame, not a live fire. On a home stove this is low heat. If the pan is over the same coals that cooked the steak, pull it to the cooler edge.
- The steak namesA Delmonico is a boneless rib or top-loin cut, still sold under that name in some markets. "Jack Dempsey" means nothing at a modern counter; from the recipe's own description -- 1 1/4 pounds, only 3 or 4 cut from a half of beef -- it is a thick individual steak, so ask for a 1 1/4-pound bone-in rib or strip steak.
- Use the pan drippingsThe recipe does not say so, but the sauce is made in a frying pan; if it is the pan the steak came out of, build it in the unwashed skillet so the browned fond dissolves into the sauce.
- YieldNot stated; enough for the steaks cooked, with a little left for the potatoes.
Steak in camp is a boast as much as a meal, and this passage is written like one: the sauce exists mainly to prove that a fire in the open can produce restaurant food. Bottled chili sauce, commercially available from the late nineteenth century, was cheap, shelf-stable and widely stocked, and outdoor and campfire cookbooks lean on it as an instant base for barbecue mops, gravies and steak sauces. The named cuts point East: Delmonico's in New York had lent its name to a thick loin steak by the later nineteenth century. "Jack Dempsey" as a steak name is presumably an echo of the fighter's fame, though the origin is not documented here. The West-versus-East business about panfried T-bones and onions is regional pride rather than any documented culinary divide.