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Broiled Meat Cakes
Chop finely lean raw beef, season with salt and pepper, shape in small flat cakes, and broil in a greased broiler or frying-pan. Spread with butter, or serve with Maître d'Hôtel Butter. In forming the cakes, handle as little as possible; for if pressed too compactly, cakes will be found solid.
Fannie Farmer's plainest hamburger, written before the word was standard in American cookbooks. Almost everything depends on the handling.
- Handle the meat looselyThe closing line is the whole recipe. Shape the cakes with a light hand, just until they hold, and stop; compacted meat cooks into something dense and springy rather than tender.
- "Chop finely lean raw beef"This means hand-chopped or hand-ground meat, not the fine paste a food processor makes. Coarse ground chuck or sirloin is the modern equivalent; wholly lean beef will be dry, so around 15 to 20 percent fat is better eating.
- Broiler means a grid over coalsIn 1896 a "greased broiler" was a hinged wire gridiron held over the fire, not an overhead element. A ridged grill pan or a heavy skillet over high heat gives the same result.
- Cooking timeNone is given. Small flat cakes about three-quarters of an inch thick take roughly three to four minutes a side over high heat. Because the beef is ground, cook it through to 160F rather than leaving the centre rare.
- Maître d'Hôtel ButterA cross-reference in the original: butter creamed with salt, pepper, chopped parsley and lemon juice. Spread on the hot cake it melts into a sauce; if you chill it firm first, a slice does the same job.
- YieldNone is given. A pound of beef will make four to six of the "small flat cakes" the recipe calls for, smaller than a modern burger.
- SaltingSeason the meat just before shaping. Salt worked in early and left to stand draws out protein and firms the texture, the very fault the last sentence warns against.
Chopped beef cakes appear across late nineteenth-century American cookbooks under a variety of names -- beef cakes, Hamburg steak, cannelon -- as mechanical meat grinders became fixtures in butcher shops and then in home kitchens. Farmer places this among her beef recipes, and it comes with no cooking time and no yield. Hamburg steak of the same period is often said to have been a larger patty, sometimes with onion and egg worked in and sometimes pan-fried in a sauce; this version is deliberately stripped to meat, salt, pepper and fire, with the butter doing the work of a sauce. The insistence on light handling is the sort of practical observation that made the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book useful, and it remains the difference between a good burger and a bad one.