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Sirloin Steak En Casserole
3 tablespoons butter or other Pepper fat
Turnip balls
3 tablespoons flour
Carrot balls
2 cups stock
Potato balls
Salt
Small onions
Parsley
2 pounds of ½-inch steak
Make a brown sauce of the fat, flour, stock and seasoning. Add balls of turnip, carrot, potato and onions, which have been previously cooked in a little brown stock until tender. For each person, allow a half-dozen little balls of each of these vegetables and two small onions. Keep this sauce hot while you pan-broil the steak until about half done, then transfer steak to heated casserole, pour vegetables and sauce over steak, cover, and place in oven until steak is sufficiently cooked. When ready to serve, sprinkle the steak with finely chopped parsley.
The ingredient list has been mangled by the original two-column typesetting; read it as butter or fat, flour, stock, salt, pepper, parsley, 2 lb of half-inch steak, and balls of turnip, carrot, potato and small onions. The rest is a straightforward brown sauce with a steak finished under cover.
- The hinge: half-cooked steakA half-inch steak is thin, and it goes into the oven already half done. Give it no more than a minute a side in the pan and expect only a few minutes under cover — the residual heat of two cups of sauce will carry it further than seems likely. Pull it at rare if you want it medium on the plate.
- Untangling the ingredientsSet out 3 tablespoons butter or fat, 3 tablespoons flour, 2 cups stock, salt and pepper for the sauce; turnip, carrot and potato balls plus small onions for the garnish; parsley to finish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Use 350F: hot enough to keep the sauce at a bare simmer, not so hot that it reduces to paste before the steak is done.
- "Casserole" hereThe word appears to mean the covered vessel itself rather than the dish cooked in it. It must be preheated, as the recipe says — a cold dish will drop the sauce well below simmering and stew the meat grey.
- Pan-broilThis means a heavy dry skillet over high heat, no added fat, with any rendered fat poured off as it accumulates. It is a searing method, not frying, and it is the only browning the steak gets.
- The vegetable ballsCut with a melon baller or parisienne scoop from peeled turnip, carrot and potato. They are cooked separately in brown stock first because they will never soften in the short time the steak spends in the oven.
- StockTwo cups of real brown stock, or a good low-sodium beef stock reduced a little. Salt the sauce lightly at the start: it concentrates in the covered dish, and commercial stock is already salty.
- YieldTwo pounds of steak serves four. The vegetable allowance is generous — six balls each of turnip, carrot and potato plus two onions per person means seventy-odd balls for four, so prepare well over a pound of vegetables.
Casserole cookery had its vogue in American and British households in the 1900s and 1910s, when fireproof earthenware and the new enamelled ironware made it possible to cook and serve in the same vessel — a real saving of labour in a kitchen losing its servants. The dish itself is French in manner rather than in name: the brown sauce, the scooped vegetable balls and the finishing shower of chopped parsley echo the professional repertoire of the period, scaled down to a domestic range. The vegetable-baller was a fashionable small tool of these years, and turning ordinary root vegetables into something that looked deliberate on a plate was a large part of the appeal.