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Hamburg Steak
Break the fiber of a round steak by beating well, fry two or three onions minced fine in butter slightly browned, spread the onions over the meat, fold the ends of the meat together and pound again to keep the onions in the middle; broil two or three minutes; season with salt and pepper and butter well.
Fried Hamburg Steak with Russian Sauce Select a piece of the buttock of beef, remove all the fat, and chop very fine, lay it in a bowl and add a very finely chopped shallot, two raw eggs, a little salt and pepper together with a little grated nutmeg. Mix well together and form the mass into six balls the size of fillets; roll these in breadcrumbs, and fry in a pan with a little clarified butter for four or five minutes, turning frequently and keeping them slightly underdone. Serve with a Russian sauce.
Two dishes run together under one heading: a stuffed, pounded steak and the fried chopped-beef cakes that are closer to what we now call a hamburger. The second is the more useful of the pair, and the phrase that needs the most attention is "slightly underdone."
- Buttock of beefAn old butcher's term for the rump and round — lean, dense, and cheap. Ask for top round or bottom round and grind it coarsely, or chop it by hand as the recipe directs; hand-chopped meat tends to hold a looser, juicier texture than machine mince.
- Underdone chopped beefGrinding or chopping spreads surface bacteria through the whole mass, which is why whole steak can be served rare and a beef cake cannot. If you want these pink in the middle, buy a whole piece of muscle and grind it yourself the same day; otherwise cook to 160F throughout.
- Broil means broilFor the first recipe, "broil two or three minutes" assumes a hot grid over coals or a gas broiler close to the flame. Use a broiler element or a very hot grill pan, and expect the pounded, folded steak to need longer than three minutes for anything thicker than half an inch.
- Fry in clarified butterClarified butter is specified because whole butter's milk solids scorch before the cakes are done. Melt butter, skim the foam, pour off the clear fat and leave the milky residue behind, or substitute ghee.
- Size of filletsOscar means fillet steaks — thick round cakes, not flattened patties. The original gives no weight.
- Two raw eggsTwo whole eggs to six cakes is generous, and with breadcrumbs on the outside rather than in the mix the interior can go soft. One egg is enough to bind hand-chopped beef; hold the second back unless the mixture will not hold a shape.
- Russian sauceThe name covered more than one preparation in hotel kitchens of this period: a cold mayonnaise-based sauce, sometimes with caviar, and also a horseradish-and-sour-cream sauce. Either is period-appropriate; the recipe itself gives no formula.
- YieldThe fried version serves six as written, or three generously. The stuffed steak serves two to four depending on the size of the round.
Hamburg steak arrived in American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century as a dish of the German-speaking immigrant kitchens and, by a connection often traced but not firmly documented, the transatlantic steamer lines out of Hamburg — chopped or scraped beef, seasoned, sometimes bound with egg, and cooked as a cake or a small steak. It was widely prescribed by doctors of the era as an easily digested, strengthening food for invalids and dyspeptics, which is part of why it turns up in so many general household books alongside beef tea and scraped beef sandwiches. Oscar Tschirky's version belongs to the other end of the scale: hand-chopped buttock, shallot, nutmeg, clarified butter and a named sauce, the Waldorf's treatment of a plain dish that its guests would have recognized from cheaper tables. The bun-and-griddle hamburger as a national sandwich comes later; here the steak is still a steak, served on a plate with a sauce beside it.