Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Broiled Rib Steak
Broiled Rib Steak
Cut the steak about half an inch thick from between the two ribs, remove all the gristle and fat, trim to a flat pear-shape, and sprinkle both sides with pepper and salt and oil to prevent outside hardening; broil twelve minutes over a moderate and even fire. Place about four ounces of maitre d'hotel butter on a dish, lay the steak upon it and garnish with fried potatoes, serving either piquant, Italian or tomato sauce with the steak.
A half-inch steak over a hotel broiler behaves nothing like a half-inch steak over a modern gas grill, and the twelve-minute instruction is the one thing here that will ruin the dish.
- The timingTwelve minutes on a half-inch steak gives grey meat throughout. On a hot grill or under a preheated broiler, that thickness needs roughly two to three minutes a side for medium-rare. The recipe's own "moderate and even fire" suggests a gentler heat than a modern grill, but not gentle enough to justify twelve minutes.
- "A moderate and even fire"Presumably fuel burned down to steady embers rather than flaring flame. On gas, medium-high with the lid open; under a broiler, the element fully preheated with the meat on the second rung rather than pressed against it.
- The cut"From between the two ribs" means a rib steak taken thin off the rib section, closer to what a butcher now calls a thin-cut ribeye or entrecôte. Cut this thin it is a fast-cooking steak, not a roast.
- Trimming to a pear shapeLargely a plating convention of the period, though an even flat shape also cooks more evenly, and it costs you meat. Removing the gristle and the hard outer fat is worth doing; the silhouette is optional.
- The oilA thin film of oil before seasoning is still standard practice; it conducts heat and keeps the surface from drying. Salt can go on just before cooking or up to an hour ahead, but pepper scorches on a very hot grid, so many cooks now add it after.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Four ounces under one thin steak is a restaurant flourish; an ounce or two is plenty at home, and it should be cold enough to melt slowly into the meat juices rather than pooling.
- The saucesPiquant and Italian are classic French brown-sauce derivatives built on a stock reduction; tomato stands on its own. All three are given here as alternatives rather than additions. With the compound butter already on the plate, one or the other is enough.
- YieldOne steak, one diner. The fried potatoes and the butter are the whole garnish.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 Cook Book reads like a working inventory of a large hotel kitchen rather than a domestic manual: hundreds of near-identical steak and chop entries, each distinguished only by its garnish, butter or sauce. That is how a la carte service worked in the period: one grilled cut could leave the kitchen several different ways from a single set of instructions. The maitre d'hotel butter melting under the meat is one of the compound-butter garnishes in French service, said by tradition to be named for the dining-room manager and generally traced to early nineteenth-century Paris restaurant practice, where it was the simplest way to give a plain grilled cut a sauce without a saucier.