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Broiled Beefsteak
Rub the broiler with suet before you lay the steak upon it. The fire should be clear and hot. Turn swiftly to keep the smoke from it, and the juices in. Try with the point of a knife at the end of ten minutes. If the center of the steak be red, and not purple, and the outside of a fine brown, it is done. Remove to a hot platter, pepper, salt and butter well on both sides. Fit a close cover on the dish and set in the open oven for five minutes to draw the juices to the surface.
A 1900s broiling method written for a coal or wood range with a hinged wire broiler held over live coals. The technique translates cleanly to a grill, a cast-iron pan, or an overhead broiler, with a few adjustments.
- The hinge: turn often, not onceThe hinge: turning -- "Turn swiftly" may mean turn quickly rather than turn often, but either way speed over a very hot fire is the point: it browns both faces without scorching while the interior comes up. Modern testing suggests steaks turned every 30 to 60 seconds cook somewhat faster and more evenly than steaks turned once.
- Rubbing the broiler with suetSuet is raw beef kidney fat, sold by butchers and sometimes frozen at the supermarket. Its job here is purely to keep the meat from welding to the wires; a scrap of the steak's own fat cap, or a neutral high-smoke-point oil wiped on the hot grate, does the same.
- "A clear and hot fire"Clear means coals burned down past the flame and smoke stage, glowing and ash-grey — no leaping flames. On gas, that is the burner on high with the grate preheated ten minutes; under a broiler, the element fully hot with the rack close beneath it.
- Ten minutes is for a thick steakTen minutes suggests a thick steak -- The recipe never gives a thickness, but ten minutes over a clear hot fire implies something well over an inch. A three-quarter-inch supermarket steak will be past medium in six or seven minutes over that heat. Judge by the meat, not the clock.
- Testing by cutting, and the better optionCutting with a knife point does release juice. An instant-read thermometer gives the same information without the hole: 130–135°F for the "red, not purple" centre described here, which is a true medium-rare to medium.
- Season after, not beforeThe recipe salts only once the steak is off the fire, common in period cookery on the theory that salt drew out the juices. Modern practice usually salts well in advance — 40 minutes or more, so the salt is reabsorbed — or immediately before cooking; salting a few minutes before it hits the heat is generally thought the least useful moment.
- The covered dish in the open ovenThis is a rest in a warming oven with the door ajar, so the steak holds temperature without cooking further. A warm platter tented with foil for five to ten minutes accomplishes it. Note that the recipe's own stated aim is to draw the juices to the surface, not to hold them in.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon a pound of bone-in steak for two, or six to eight ounces of boneless per person.
Broiling over coals was the prestige method for beef in nineteenth-century American cooking, reserved for the tender cuts — porterhouse, sirloin, rump steak — while everything tougher went into the pot. The *Butterick Cook Book* appeared in 1911 from the pattern company, one of many household manuals aimed at middle-class women managing kitchens without the servants their mothers had assumed, and its terseness here is telling: the writer expects the reader to know what a broiler looks like and what a clear fire is. Broiling in such a kitchen could still mean a hinged wire cage held over the coals, which would explain why the recipe frets about smoke — a smoky fire meant coals not properly burned down, and it would taint the meat. The instruction to distinguish a red centre from a purple one is a practical test that predates the kitchen thermometer: the purplish colour of raw beef gives way to bright red as the interior warms.