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Beefsteak Smothered in Onions
Slice the onions thin and drop in cold water: put steak in pan with a little suet. Skim out onions and add to steak, season with pepper and salt, cover tightly, and put over the fire. When the juice of the onions has dried up, and the meat has browned on one side, remove onions, turn steak, replace onions, and fry till done, being careful not to burn.
A one-pan steak-and-onion braise-then-fry, written for a wood range where heat came up slowly and unevenly. The method still works on a burner if you keep the lid on for the first stage and off for the last.
- The hinge: lid on, then lid offThe hinge: the covered stage, then the browning -- Covered, the onions release enough water to steam the steak; the browning only begins once that liquid has cooked away. The recipe does not actually say to uncover the pan for the second stage, though the instruction to fry till done without burning implies it. If you skip the covered stage you get fried onions and grey meat instead of the soft, jammy layer the recipe is after.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and often only by request. A tablespoon of beef tallow, bacon fat or a neutral oil with a knob of butter does the same job.
- Why the cold waterSoaking sliced onions in cold water leaches out some of the sulphur compounds, so they taste milder. Drain them well before they go in the pan, or you add more liquid to boil off.
- "Over the fire"Medium heat on a modern burner. High heat scorches the onions before their moisture has gone, which is the burning the last clause warns about.
- Cut of steakThe recipe names no cut, but the method suits a tougher one such as round or chuck, which benefits from the steaming. As a rough guide, a 1-inch round steak wants something like 8-10 minutes covered and 4-6 minutes uncovered; a tender cut like sirloin or ribeye will overcook long before the onions are done.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. Figure two large onions per pound of steak, and a pan wide enough that the meat sits flat rather than stacked.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of steak with onions serves two to three, with the pan juices spooned over.
Smothering — cooking meat under a covering of onions or gravy in a tightly closed pan — is often described as a characteristic Southern range technique, and it turns up throughout Southern and Midwestern books of the 1880s and 1890s under names like smothered steak, smothered chicken and smothered rabbit. The Dixie Cook-Book (first published in the 1880s and reissued for decades), like the better-known Buckeye Cookery, favors methods that make economical cuts palatable: the covered pan traps steam and does quietly what a long braise does slowly. The instruction to soak onions in cold water is period-standard advice for taming their bite, and appears in household manuals of the era.