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Sirloin Steak En Casserole
Have the steak an inch and a half thick. For a steak weighing two pounds, brown three tablespoons of butter in a frying-pan and stir into it the same quantity of flour, blending thoroughly and allowing it to become well browned. Add two cups of brown stock and season with salt and pepper. To this sauce add balls of turnip, carrot and potato 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 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.
A brown-sauce braise finished in a covered dish, from a period when the covered earthenware pot was the fashionable new thing in American kitchens. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need supplying.
- The hinge: don't cook the steak twicePan-broil only until the outside is seared and the centre still rare, then let the oven finish it in the sauce. A 1½-inch sirloin needs roughly 10-15 minutes at 350F under cover to reach medium-rare; much beyond that and a sirloin turns dry and grainy no matter how much sauce surrounds it.
- "Casserole" here means the vesselA lidded earthenware pot rather than a baked dish of mixed food. Any covered braiser or Dutch oven works, provided it is heated as the recipe directs so the steak is not chilled when it goes in.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this; the sauce is already hot and the point is to finish the meat gently rather than to brown anything further.
- Brown stockVeal or beef bones roasted before simmering. A good low-sodium beef stock is the practical substitute, but reduce it a little first — period stock was more gelatinous and clung to the meat.
- The brown rouxThree tablespoons each butter and flour browned together will thicken two cups of stock to a light coating sauce. Browned flour loses thickening power, so although the recipe asks for it to become well browned, expect the result to be looser than a blond roux of the same weight.
- Vegetable ballsCut with a Parisienne scoop, about ½ inch across. Cook them in stock before they go into the sauce, as the recipe directs -- potato boiled with the rest will cloud and thicken it.
- The onionsTwo small onions per person means peeled pearl or small boiling onions, parboiled with the other vegetables until barely tender. Raw ones will not soften in the short oven time.
- YieldTwo pounds of sirloin serves four generously with the vegetables, which means scaling the vegetable count to four portions — about 24 balls of each and eight onions.
Butterick's casserole chapter belongs to a brief American vogue, running from roughly the turn of the twentieth century through the 1910s, for cooking and serving in the same covered earthenware pot — a habit often traced to French provincial kitchens. The dish itself is a hybrid: the steak is pan-broiled in the American manner, then finished in a brown roux sauce made with brown stock, with a garnish of turned or scooped root vegetables. Serving from the pot at table was the selling point, saving both a serving dish and the heat lost between kitchen and dining room.