Hamburg Steak
1 Pound Beef Round, Chopped Fine Teaspoon Onion Juice Teaspoon Salt Teaspoon Pepper 1 Egg Nutmeg (a little) Soup Stock Remove all fibre and fat from the meat; mix all together thoroughly; make into small balls and press flat. Fry in drippings; make a brown gravy of drippings used in frying; add a little soup stock and pour over the meat.
A plain 1900s hamburg steak: seasoned ground round, bound with egg, pan-fried and served under a pan gravy. Two of the measurements in the printed text are almost certainly missing their fractions.
- The suspect quantitiesA full teaspoon of salt to a pound of beef is reasonable; a full teaspoon of pepper is not, and the fraction marks have likely dropped out in printing. Start with 1/4 teaspoon pepper and a scant teaspoon of salt.
- Beef round, chopped fineThis means ground round, roughly 85-90% lean. Stripping out the fat and fibre likely explains the egg: with little fat in the mix the patties need a binder or they crumble in the pan.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without pieces: grate onion on a fine rasp and press out the liquid, or squeeze the juice from grated onion in a sieve. How much onion a teaspoon takes will vary; grate a quarter to half a small onion and press.
- DonenessGround beef should reach 160F throughout, which for a flattened ball about half an inch thick is roughly three minutes a side in a hot pan. The period sources say nothing about internal temperature because thermometers were not household equipment.
- DrippingsBeef drippings or lard were the default frying fats. Any neutral oil or clarified butter works; if you use butter alone it will brown too fast before the centre is done.
- The gravyPour off all but a tablespoon of fat, stir in a tablespoon of flour, cook it until it smells nutty and is genuinely brown, then whisk in stock; the recipe calls for only 'a little', so start with half a cup and add more if you want it looser. Undercooked roux is a common reason these old pan gravies taste pasty.
- Soup stockPlain beef stock, unsalted if possible, since the drippings are already seasoned. Canned low-sodium beef broth is the closest ready substitute.
- NutmegFreshly grated, and no more than a few scrapes. It is meant to sit under the beef flavour, not sit on top of it — the effect should be unidentifiable.
- YieldA pound makes four to six small flattened patties, enough for two to three people with a starch and a vegetable.
The name records the dish's route rather than any single kitchen: chopped and seasoned beef served as a steak was associated with Hamburg, and "Hamburg steak" appears on American restaurant menus and in cookbooks well before the sandwich form took the name. Through the late nineteenth century it also carried a reputation as invalid and convalescent food, since finely chopped lean beef was thought easy to digest, which may be part of why the fat and fibre are so carefully removed here. The egg binder and the whisper of nutmeg belong to an older, more continental treatment than the later flat patty in a bun.