Home › Meats › Baked Hamburg Steak
Baked Hamburg Steak
Finely chop one and one-half pounds of raw fresh meat; add two cups of bread soaked in milk, one small minced onion, salt, pepper and ginger to taste, and two eggs; then roll the mass into a square. Boil four eggs until hard, arrange them end to end across the middle of the meat, and roll the latter about them. Place the roll in a baking-pan, pour over it a sauce composed of tomatoes, onions, a large piece of butter and a little water, and bake, basting frequently. Slice the roll crosswise for serving.
HAMBURG STEAK (Broiled) - Have the butcher chop very fine two pounds of the round of beef, and a little suet. Press it into a flat steak about three-fourths of an inch thick, sprinkle with salt, pepper, a little onion juice, if liked, and flour, lay it in a fine wire broiler, and broil the same as beefsteak. Spread with butter and serve on a hot dish. This steak is sometimes shaped into small, thin, flat cakes and fried in a frying-pan, a little pork-fat or butter being used to keep the meat from sticking to the pan. A gravy is then made by thickening the juices in the pan, a little water being added before the thickening.
Two related dishes in one entry: a stuffed meat roll baked in tomato sauce, and plain chopped steak either broiled or fried into cakes. Both are workable as written; the gaps are oven temperature, timing and the fat content of the meat.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given. Bake the roll at 350F for about 1 to 1 1/4 hours, basting every 15 minutes with the pan sauce. Ground meat should reach 160F at the center, measured away from the buried eggs.
- The bread is a panade, not a fillerTwo cups of bread means torn stale crumb, not measured dry crumbs. Cover with milk, let it sit until soft, then squeeze out the excess before mixing, or the roll will be too slack to shape around the eggs.
- Shaping around the eggsThe recipe says to roll the mass into a square. Pat it out on parchment or a damp cloth, lay the peeled hard-boiled eggs end to end down the center, and use the cloth to lift and seal the meat over them. Pinch the seam and ends closed firmly; a gap lets the roll split and the eggs fall out when sliced.
- GingerThe recipe says only 'ginger to taste'. Ground ginger, perhaps 1/4 teaspoon for this quantity, is the likeliest reading.
- The sauceUnquantified. Roughly a 15 oz can of tomatoes, one chopped onion, 2 to 3 tablespoons butter and 1/4 cup water gives enough to baste with and still have gravy. Taste before serving.
- Round beef plus suetRound alone is too lean to broil well. Suet is hard beef kidney fat, still available from a butcher; if you skip it, use 85/15 ground beef rather than anything leaner.
- The wire broilerA hinged wire gridiron held over coals. A cast-iron grill pan or the oven broiler does the same work, but handle the steak with two spatulas: a chopped steak three-quarters of an inch thick has no structure and will break if you flip it like a beefsteak.
- Onion juice and flourGrate an onion on a box grater and use the liquid, not the pulp, so nothing burns on the grill. The dusting of flour is for browning and to hold surface moisture; it is not a coating.
- YieldThe baked roll serves six, sliced about an inch thick. The broiled version, at two pounds, serves four to six.
Hamburg steak is documented in American menus and cookbooks chiefly from the 1870s name generally traced to the port of Hamburg and the German emigrants who sailed from it, and it became standard household fare, valued for turning cheap round steak into something that ate like a chop. The baked version here, with hard-boiled eggs laid end to end so each slice shows a ring of yolk, is the same idea as the German falscher Hase, or mock hare, and the trick of concealing whole eggs in a forcemeat roll is older than either. Worth noting that this entry predates the hamburger sandwich's dominance: chopped beef is treated as a steak to be broiled and buttered, or as a roast to be sliced, and the little fried cakes are mentioned last, almost as an afterthought.