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Broiled Sirloin Steak
Cut the steak to about half an inch in thickness, place on a gridiron over a clear fire and broil until done. Place on a dish with a little warmed butter poured over it, and serve.
Two sentences of instruction that assume a cook already knows what a clear fire looks like and how a steak feels when it is done. The gaps worth filling are heat, thickness and doneness.
- A clear fireThis means coals burned down past the flame stage, glowing and ash-grey at the edges, with no smoke or flare. On a gas grill the equivalent is the burners run wide open for ten minutes with the lid down; in a kitchen, a cast-iron pan heated until a drop of water skitters and vanishes.
- Half an inch is thinAt that thickness the steak cooks through in roughly two to three minutes a side over high heat, and there is no window between rare and grey. If you want a pink centre with a dark crust, cut it at 1 to 1.5 inches instead and expect four to five minutes a side.
- Doneness"Until done" is all the book gives; in a hotel kitchen it would presumably have meant cooked to the guest's order. Use an instant-read thermometer: 125F for rare, 130-135F for medium rare, 145F for medium, pulling it about 5 degrees short and letting it rest.
- The gridironA gridiron is a hinged or footed grill of iron bars set directly over coals. Preheat it before the meat goes on, or the steak sticks and tears when you turn it; a wire brush and a wipe of fat on the hot bars does the same job as modern nonstick.
- Season itThe recipe names no salt, an omission common in terse professional instructions. Salt both sides well before cooking; pepper after, since it scorches over a live fire.
- Warmed butter, not meltedThe point is butter soft enough to pour but not broken and oily. Warm it gently to just liquid, or better, drop a knob of cold butter on the hot steak and let it melt into the juices as it rests.
- Sirloin, then and nowNineteenth-century American butchery cut the sirloin generously and often with the bone in. A modern boneless top sirloin or a New York strip both behave the way this recipe expects; bottom sirloin is leaner and less forgiving at this thickness.
- YieldFigure 8 to 10 ounces of trimmed steak per person, which at half an inch thick means a fairly broad piece per plate.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a volume of some 900 pages that reads less like a cookbook for households than like a working index of what a large hotel kitchen was expected to produce on demand. Terseness like this is the tell: a broiled sirloin needed no explaining to the men on the broiler station, only a note of the standard cut, the standard finish and the standard plating, so that any cook on any shift sent out the same dish. The plain broiled steak with butter was the backbone of American hotel and chophouse cooking through the second half of the nineteenth century, and the gridiron over coals is generally taken to have been the professional standard, though gas broilers were already entering large kitchens by the 1890s and the timing of the shift is uncertain. The butter poured over at the end is the whole sauce, a habit that survives in the pat of maitre d'hotel butter still put on steaks today.