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Beefsteak and Onions
Heat a frying-pan until quite hot, and place the steak in it, adding no fat at all. (Or, broil it over a clear fire.) Cook until the meat is either rare or well done, as may be preferred. If the finer cuts are used, care must be taken that the meat is not cooked too long, but the round will need to be fairly well cooked to make it juicy and tender. Remove the steak to the serving dish. Slice the onions thin and turn them into the pan in which the steak is cooked. (Or, if the steak is broiled, put them in a pan of some kind using beef drippings and cooking until nicely browned.) Cover the pan, and cook the onions slowly in the juices from the steak until they are tender; then lift them out and place them on top of the steak. Add a litle water to the juices in the pan, and thicken the gravy with a little flour or cornstarch wet in a little water. Season with salt and pepper, cook a fine brown, and pour over the onions and steak.
No quantities are given, which is normal for this era of steak cookery — the method is the recipe. Assume a steak of 1 to 1½ lb and two medium onions for two people.
- The dry panCooking with no added fat is sound: a beef steak renders enough of its own. Use heavy cast iron or carbon steel brought to smoking and dry the surface of the meat first, or you steam rather than sear. Ventilate the kitchen; a dry pan at that heat smokes heavily.
- Ignore the advice on round steakRound does not become juicy and tender with longer cooking — it becomes drier and tougher. Round is a braising or thin-slicing cut. If you want the pan-steak-and-onions treatment, use sirloin, strip or flatiron and pull it at 130–135°F for medium rare.
- "A clear fire"This means charcoal or wood burned down past the flames to steady glowing coals, with no smoke or flare-up. A gas or charcoal grill at high heat is the equivalent.
- Rest the steak while the onions cookThe instruction to remove the steak before the onions go in gives it a natural rest, which is exactly what it wants. Catch the resting juices and add them to the gravy.
- Beef drippingsThe rendered fat saved from roasts. Any beef fat, or the fat left in the pan, does the job; butter browns too fast at the heat the onions want at the start.
- Slow, covered onionsCovered and low is the key to this dish — the onions sweat in their own moisture and the pan juices instead of frying. Fifteen to twenty-five minutes, stirring now and then. If the pan runs dry before they soften, a spoonful of water, not more fat.
- The gravyAbout a teaspoon of flour or half that of cornstarch per half cup of liquid, slaked in cold water first. "Cook a fine brown" refers to the colour of the finished gravy; in practice let it bubble a minute or two so the raw starch taste goes, and deglaze the fond into it before thickening.
- YieldServes two generously, three modestly, with potatoes.
Steak and onions is one of the oldest patterns in English and American cooking, and this version belongs to the era of cooking on the cast-iron range rather than the open hearth. Note that the book gives broiling over coals as the alternative, not the default "the clear fire was becoming a memory. The insistence on adding no fat at all reflects a genuine confidence in the beef the recipe assumes. The book's inclusion of round among the options is telling too: the recipe was written with the cheaper cuts in mind, and the advice to cook round longer, though wrong by modern standards, seems to have been common counsel at the time.