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Beefsteaks with Fried Apples
Procure six small tender sirloin steaks of four ounces each, neatly flatten. Mix on a plate tablespoon oil, teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Repeatedly turn steaks in seasoning, then arrange on a broiler and broil four minutes on each side. Dress on a dish and keep hot. Peel and core three good-sized sound apples, then cut each in four even slices, dip in milk, lightly roll in flour, place in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat four minutes. Drain on a cloth, arrange around steaks, spread a little maitre d'hotel over the steaks and serve.
A quick broiler dish that stands or falls on the apples: they want to be fried fast enough to brown before they collapse. Everything else is straightforward, though two of the original's terms need translating.
- "Boiling fat" means hot fat, not boilingDeep fat for frying should be 375F. Cooking oil does not boil at any temperature you would use in a kitchen; the phrase is period shorthand for fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when food is lowered in. Four minutes at 375F will brown floured apple rings; much cooler and they absorb fat and turn to sauce.
- Maitre d'hotel butterThe recipe assumes you have it on hand. It is softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice and salt and pepper, chilled and sliced, or spread soft over the hot meat as here. Roughly 4 tablespoons butter, a tablespoon of parsley and two teaspoons lemon juice covers six steaks.
- Steak sizeSix four-ounce sirloins, flattened, are thin cuts of roughly half an inch or less. Four minutes a side under a broiler will take them to medium or beyond; if your butcher gives you 6 to 8 oz steaks an inch thick, expect closer to five or six minutes a side and rest them while you fry the apples.
- Broiler positionSet the rack so the meat sits 3 to 4 inches from the element, with the broiler fully preheated. The oiled seasoning mix is all the fat needed.
- Cutting the apples"Cut each in four even slices" means crosswise rings from a cored apple; dividing a good-sized apple into just four gives fairly thick rings, upwards of half an inch. A firm variety holds shape: Granny Smith, Braeburn, or any baking apple. Soft eating apples fall apart in the basket.
- Frying basketOptional. A spider or slotted spoon works, but keep the rings in a single layer and fry in two batches so the fat does not drop below 350F.
- Order of workFry the apples first and hold them on a rack in a low oven, or broil the steaks and let them rest while the apples cook. Both hot at once is the only real difficulty in the recipe.
- YieldServes six as written, one steak and two apple rings each.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1906) as a survey of national styles for American households, and this pairing is often placed in the Central European tradition of serving apple with rich meat, the same logic that puts applesauce beside pork or roast goose. Fried apple rings in a milk-and-flour coating seem to have been a familiar late-nineteenth-century garnish for both beef and calf's liver, and the deep-fat frying basket he takes for granted was a normal piece of restaurant equipment by then. The maitre d'hotel butter finishing the steaks is the standard French professional touch of the period: broiled meat was seldom sent to the table without a compound butter or a sauce, and this one, parsley and lemon in butter, was said to be among the plainest and most used of them all.