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Pepper Steak Chines
One pound top round steak; 1 tbsp. butter, 2 large onions, 1 can tomatoes, 2 medium size green peppers. Fry onion brown in the butter, add steak cut in 1/2 inch dices, toss until brown on all sides. Add tomatoes and peppers cut in one inch strips, 1/4 inch wide. Salt and pepper to taste. Cook until the peppers are tender. Fry them with a tooth pick; serve hot on boiled rice.
— Miss L. M. Ketcham
A one-pan skillet dish that needs almost no translation, though two lines in the original will trip a reader.
- "Fry them with a tooth pick"A typesetting slip for try them with a toothpick — pierce a strip of pepper to test whether it has gone tender. It is a doneness test, not a cooking step.
- What "1 can tomatoes" meantTomatoes of this era were commonly sold in the No. 2 can, holding roughly 20 oz, about 2 1/2 cups with their juice, though larger sizes were also on the shelf. A modern 28 oz can, drained of some liquid, is the closest match; a 14.5 oz can will leave the dish dry.
- Top roundStill sold under that name and still lean and firm. Cut into 1/2-inch dice as directed and sear it hard and briefly; this dish is too short a cook to tenderise the meat, so a middling simmer will only tighten it. Trim any tough fascia before dicing.
- Order of operationsBrowning the onions first in a single tablespoon of butter means they will be well caramelised and close to catching by the time the meat goes in. Use a heavy skillet, keep the heat moderate, and scrape the fond up when the tomatoes go in.
- Cooking timeThe recipe gives none. Figure 15 to 20 minutes uncovered after the tomatoes go in, which is about how long the peppers need and long enough to reduce the sauce to a coating consistency.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper to taste is the whole seasoning list. Canned tomatoes of the period were often packed plain and could be quite sharp; a pinch of sugar and a generous hand with black pepper bring it closer to the dish the name promises.
- YieldA pound of steak stretched with tomatoes and peppers serves four over rice, three if the rice is scant.
The name marks this as one of countless American approximations of Chinese cooking that circulated in church and club cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, when chop suey houses had spread well beyond the coastal Chinatowns and "Chinese" on a recipe title mostly signalled meat and vegetables cut small, cooked fast, and served on rice. Nothing in the method is Chinese — there is no soy, no ginger, no wok, and the fat is butter — but the fundamental idea of a beef-and-green-pepper stir-fry over rice is a real one, and the pepper steak of later American restaurant menus belongs to the same family. Contributed recipes like Miss Ketcham's are the useful record here: they show what an ordinary cook actually put on the table when she meant to cook something foreign, working from a canned tomato and whatever she had read or been told.