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Broiled Loin Steaks
Two loin steaks of about a pound each are required for this dish; season them with salt and pepper to taste, baste on either side with a little oil, place on a broiler over a bright charcoal fire, and broil them for six minutes, each side. Serve on a hot dish with Bordeaux sauce over them, and garnished with rounds of marrow.
A hotel grill-cook's shorthand: two thick steaks, live charcoal, and a red-wine sauce finished with marrow. Almost everything that matters here is in the fire and the garnish.
- What "loin steak" meansThe book says only "loin steak," which in this period could mean a cut from the short loin — what a butcher now sells as strip loin, or, with bone and fillet attached, a T-bone or porterhouse. A pound apiece suggests a steak on the order of 1½ inches thick, not a thin supermarket cut.
- The heat, not the timingSix minutes a side is calibrated to a bed of glowing charcoal with no flame, close under the meat. On a gas grill or in a broiler that runs cooler, go by internal temperature instead: 125F for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare, pulled and rested five to ten minutes.
- Rounds of marrowBeef marrow bones, sawn crosswise into short lengths, soaked in cold salted water to draw out blood, then the marrow pushed out and poached in gentle stock or salted water for a few minutes until just set and translucent. It should be firm enough to lift out in discs; boiling melts it away.
- Bordeaux sauceOscar means sauce bordelaise: red wine reduced with shallot, cracked pepper and thyme, brought together with demi-glace and, classically, marrow whisked in at the end. Any good reduced red-wine sauce built on veal or beef stock stands in for it.
- Basting oilA light brushing of oil helps keep the surface from sticking to the bars and helps it colour. A neutral oil with a high smoke point is the safer choice; olive oil can smoke and take on a bitter edge over very hot charcoal.
- Serve on a hot dishThis is not a flourish. Marrow and a butter-slack bordelaise both set up and go greasy on a cold plate, so warm the platter and the plates.
- YieldTwo one-pound steaks serve two generously or four modestly; the recipe as written sends them out whole with the sauce over them.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) records the working repertoire of the original Waldorf, and this entry shows how little a hotel grill order needed to be written down: the cook already knew what a loin steak was and how his charcoal behaved. The two flourishes are period markers. Charcoal broiling was the mark of a first-class American grill room well into the twentieth century, at a time when much home cooking is thought to have been done on a coal range with no direct fire at all. And the rounds of poached marrow with a red-wine sauce are straight out of the French repertoire. The sauce is traced to the wine country around Bordeaux and is conventionally finished with marrow, which is why à la bordelaise on a nineteenth-century menu so often signalled beef with marrow on top. Marrow was cheap, rich and unremarkable then; it is often said to have faded from American restaurant menus for much of the twentieth century, and has only lately come back.