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Breakfast Steak
A nice steak of beef or veal; pound it with a steak mallet, if tough; lay in a baking tin, dredge it lightly with flour, season with salt and pepper, and, if you like, a little chopped parsley; then put in the oven and bake for twenty or thirty minutes, or until sufficiently well done; take it up, put it on the platter, spread with butter, and dredge into the juices of the meat in the baking pan a little flour, and season with butter; let this boil up and pour over the steak. This is very nice.
A plain oven-cooked steak with a flour gravy made in the same pan — the sort of thing written for a cook who had a range going all morning anyway. A few things need translating.
- No temperature is givenNineteenth-century cooks judged by hand and by draught. For a steak baked in an open tin, treat it as a hot oven, 425F, so the surface browns before the interior overcooks.
- Twenty to thirty minutes is a long timeThat timing assumes a thick, tough cut and a doneness standard closer to well done than anything served now. A 1-inch beef steak in a hot oven will usually be done well short of twenty minutes; go by a thermometer rather than the clock, around 130-135F for medium rare and 135-145F for medium.
- Veal is differentVeal has little intramuscular fat and dries out fast. If using veal, cook to 145F and rest it; the same treatment that suits a chuck or round steak will ruin a veal cutlet.
- "Pound it with a steak mallet, if tough"This is the hinge. The recipe is built for cheap, sinewy cuts — round, chuck, flank — where mechanical tenderising does the work that a short cook time cannot. A ribeye or strip needs no mallet at all.
- Dredging with flourThe light flour coating is there to brown and to thicken the pan juices later, not to make a crust. Use it sparingly or it goes pasty under the butter.
- "Season with butter" in the gravyAn old idiom meaning enrich or finish with butter, not season in the sense of salt. Whisk the flour into the hot drippings, add a splash of stock or water if the pan is dry, boil it a minute to cook out the raw flour, then stir in cold butter off the heat.
- RestingThe recipe has you butter the steak while making the gravy, which conveniently rests the meat for three or four minutes. Keep that pause; it is doing real work.
- YieldNot stated. A steak of the size implied — one large piece for a family breakfast — serves two to four depending on thickness.
Breakfast in a well-provisioned North American household of the 1870s and 80s was a hot meat meal, and steak was a common sight on the morning table. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 and credited to the "ladies of Toronto and the chief cities and towns in Canada" — though it drew heavily on published American sources — is generally credited as the first fundraising community cookbook published in Canada, and is full of this kind of unfussy, unmeasured instruction he rereader already knows what a done steak looks like. Baking rather than broiling a steak suited a range whose oven was hot regardless, and the tin caught juices for the flour gravy that stretched the dish. The closing "This is very nice" is characteristic of the book's contributed entries, which often end with a personal verdict rather than a yield or a time.