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Laboratory Exercises
Pan Broiled Steak. 1. Wipe the steak on all sides with a cloth wrung out of cold water. 2. Heat a cast iron frying pan almost red hot, rub a piece of suet over the pan and put in the meat. 3. Cook it on one side for ten seconds then turn it over and cook the other side for ten seconds. When it is well seared on all sides reduce the temperature and let it cook a little more slowly until the meat is pink on the inside, turning it occasionally. Test it by cutting into the meat next to the bone. 4. Season with salt, pepper and butter and serve on a hot platter immediately.
Hamburg Steak. 1 lb. chopped beef 1 t. salt 1 t. lemon juice + t. pepper 2 T. chopped parsley C. crumbs 1. Wipe meat with a wet cloth and put through the food chopper. 2. Mix all ingredients together, form into balls one inch thick and broil.
Note. Do not buy ready-ground meat. Buy the meat and grind it yourself. The butcher will not wash the meat before he grinds it and his chopper may not be clean.
Creole Steak. 1 lb. chopped round 1/2 C. tomato pulp 1/2 C. bread crumbs 1 egg yolk 1 t. salt + t. pepper 1 slice onion. 1. Wash and grind meat. 2. Mix ingredients together and form into loaf. 3. Bake in covered pan in moderate oven 1/2 hour, then uncover and brown. 4. Serve with tomato sauce.
Note. See Exercise II for recipe for Tomato Sauce.
Beef Stew. 1½ lbs. beef 3 carrots 6 small potatoes 3 T. flour 1 onion salt and pepper 1. Wash meat and cut in one inch cubes.
MEAT 2. Melt some of the fat in the bottom of the pan, add onethird of the meat and brown in the fat. 3. Add the rest of the meat and enough cold water to cover. 4. Bring quickly to the simmering point and simmer until meat is slightly tender. 5. Add vegetables, salt, and pepper and cook until the vegetables are done. 6. Remove the vegetables and meat from the liquid, make a smooth paste of the flour and a little cold water and add to the liquid. Let boil until slightly thick, stirring constantly. 7. Arrange meat and vegetables in the center of a hot platter and pour the gravy over all.
Beef Pot Roast. 3 lbs. of beef (rump or shoulder clod). 1 C. tomatoes 1 large onion 1 rounding t. salt 1. Wipe meat with wet cloth. 2. Heat kettle very hot. Melt some of the fat and sear the meat on all sides. 3. Slice the onion in the bottom of the kettle, place the meat on the onion and pour the tomato over the meat. 4. Cover the kettle closely and place on the back of the stove where the meat will cook slowly for two and one-half hours. Add salt when meat has been cooking one hour. 1 5. When the meat is done remove to a hot platter. 6. Add a small amount of water to the broth in the kettle. Make a smooth thickening of flour and water and add to the broth. Boil two or three minutes, stirring constantly. 7. Strain gravy to remove bits of onion and tomato.
Veal Loaf. 2 lbs. chopped veal 1/3 lb. chopped fat salt pork 1/2 C. cracker crumbs 3 T. cream or milk 1 t. pepper 2 t. salt 1 egg well beaten 1. Wash the meat and remove the skin, bone and membrane. Put through the food chopper. 2. Add the rest of the ingredients, mix well and pack into a well greased bread pan. 3. Cover with greased paper and bake in slow oven two hours. 4. When cold remove from pan and slice thinly.
Broiled Bacon. 1. Scrape bacon, slice very thinly and remove rind. 2. Place slices on a fine wire broiler, place broiler over a dripping pan and bake in a hot oven until the bacon is crisp and brown, turning once. 3. Drain on soft paper. 4. Serve with poached egg and apple sauce.
Note. Bacon may be pan broiled if the fat is poured off as fast as it cooks out of the meat.
Apple Sauce. 6 apples C. water C. sugar spk. nutmeg 1. Wash, pare, core and slice apples. 2. Put into porcelain kettle, add water and cook until apples are very soft. 3. Add sugar and nutmeg, stir until sugar is dissolved, then beat with wire spoon until light.
MEAT
A block of meat exercises from a school laboratory course, written for students working at a coal or early gas range. The abbreviations and the oven descriptions need translating, and one piece of the original advice has been reversed by a century of food-safety research.
- The abbreviationsC. is one cup, T. a tablespoon, t. a teaspoon, spk. a speck (a pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon). Several quantities in this text have lost their fractions, so treat the crumb, tomato, water and sugar amounts as your own judgement rather than a fixed measure.
- Do not wash the meatThe repeated instruction to wash or wipe raw beef and veal is the one thing here that current practice rejects outright. Rinsing or wiping raw meat spreads bacteria across the sink, taps and counter without making the meat safer, since searing and roasting handle the surface. Buy clean meat, pat it dry with paper towel if you want a better sear, and discard the towel.
- Ground beef temperatureGrinding distributes surface bacteria through the whole mass, so Hamburg steak, Creole steak and veal loaf need to reach 160F throughout, not the pink interior acceptable in a whole steak. Official guidance for a whole pan-broiled steak is 145F with a rest, though cooks commonly take one to 130-135F for medium rare.
- Oven numbersModerate is 350F, slow is 300F, hot is 425-450F. So the Creole loaf bakes covered at 350F, the veal loaf at 300F for two hours, and the bacon goes into a 425F oven.
- Ten seconds is optimisticOn a modern range, ten seconds per side will not sear anything. Give a cast-iron pan five minutes to heat, then allow one to two minutes per side for a real crust before dropping the heat. Judge doneness with an instant-read thermometer rather than by cutting the steak open.
- Suet and the smoking panA piece of beef suet rubbed over a near-red-hot pan was the period's non-stick coating. Any high-smoke-point fat works; note that a pan heated to that point will fill a modern kitchen with smoke, so run the extraction and open a window.
- Broiling the Hamburg ballsThe original means cooking them under or over direct radiant heat on a wire broiler, not under a gas broiler element set very close. Balls an inch thick will cook through in about 8-10 minutes with one turn; flatten them slightly for even cooking.
- "The back of the stove"On a wood or coal range this was the coolest zone, used for long slow cooking. Translate it as the lowest setting that keeps a bare tremble in the liquid, or a covered pot at 300F in the oven for the pot roast's two and a half hours.
- VesselsA porcelain kettle for the apple sauce means enamelled ironware, chosen because bare iron and copper discoloured fruit; any non-reactive saucepan does. A wire spoon is a light wire whisk or masher.
- YieldsA pound of chopped beef gives four modest servings; the veal loaf and the three-pound pot roast each serve six to eight, and the stew four to six. Six apples make somewhere between a pint and a quart of sauce, depending on their size.
This page comes from a manual written for the household arts laboratory, the school workroom where cookery was taught as a science subject. The format shows it: numbered steps, weighed ingredients, and an instruction to test, arranged as exercises rather than as a housewife's memoranda. The meat lesson is deliberately built around economy cuts and reworkings of them, moving from a whole steak through chopped beef, a loaf and a stew to the pot roast, so that students learned the difference between dry searing heat for tender cuts and long moist cooking for tough ones. "Hamburg steak" is the older American name for a seasoned patty of chopped beef, generally traced to the beef dishes associated with the port of Hamburg and carried into American usage in the nineteenth century; the sandwich sense of "hamburger" was still settling when this was printed. The note warning against ready-ground meat reflects the food-hygiene anxieties that the domestic-science movement addressed as it saw itself teaching public health through the kitchen.