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Round Steak En Casserole
Sear both sides of a steak weighing about two pounds sufficiently to prevent the juices from escaping. This is best done on an iron griddle or iron frying-pan. Place in casserole, which has previously been heated, and add whatever vegetables are preferred, -carrots, potatoes cut in balls, and small onions, peeled. Over all pour two cups of rich brown stock or hot water and beef extract if stock is not obtainable. Cover and allow to cook slowly for about an hour. Add more stock if needed. The vegetables used in a casserole should alway be browned in a little butter or dripping before being placed in the casserole.
A straightforward braise, but the stated hour is the one number not to trust: round steak is a working muscle and needs two to three times that long before it turns tender.
- Cook it far longerTwo pounds of round braised for one hour will be tough and dry. Give it 2 to 2 1/2 hours in a 325F oven, covered, and check with a fork rather than a clock — the collagen has to break down before the meat gives way.
- The vesselAt the time this was written a "casserole" meant a lidded earthenware or fireproof-clay pot used both on the range and in the oven, not a shallow baking dish. A Dutch oven or any heavy lidded braiser does the same work. Heating it first would also have spared fragile earthenware the shock of hot liquid.
- Oven or stovetopThe original never says. Either works: hold a bare simmer over low heat, or transfer to a 325F oven, which is steadier and needs less attention.
- SearingSearing does not in fact seal in juices, as the book believed, but it builds the browned flavor the dish depends on. Dry the steak well, use a hot cast-iron pan, and do it in two batches if the meat crowds.
- Beef extractThis means a concentrated meat paste of the Bovril or Liebig type. A good commercial stock, or water plus a teaspoon of concentrated beef base, gives the same result. Season at the end — extracts and bases are salty.
- Vegetable timingBrown the carrots, onions and potatoes as directed, but add them in the last 45 minutes rather than at the start, or they will collapse over a long braise. Potatoes "cut in balls" means scooped with a melon baller, a decorative touch you can skip for even chunks.
- Liquid levelTwo cups will not cover the meat, and should not. A braise wants liquid partway up the steak; top up only if the pot threatens to go dry, and leave the lid on so little escapes.
- YieldTwo pounds of round with vegetables serves four generously. Slice the meat across the grain and reduce the pan liquid briefly if you want a thicker gravy.
Casserole cooking belongs to a moment when the covered earthenware pot was being sold to American households as a modern convenience rather than a peasant survival. French en casserole cookery seems to have reached America in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1910s glazed clay and the new fireproof glass and ceramic wares were widely advertised for the servantless kitchen: one dish, on the fire and then on the table, with little watching. The choice of round steak is the practical heart of it: a cut from the hind leg that no amount of quick cooking will make pleasant, and that slow moist heat redeems. The confident claim that searing prevents juices from escaping was standard advice in cookbooks of the period, generally traced to the nineteenth-century chemist Justus von Liebig, whose name also attached to the beef extract the recipe offers as a substitute for stock.