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Broiled Beefsteak with Fried Onions
Mix on a plate one tablespoon oil with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Trim and neatly flatten six small sirloin steaks of five ounces each; repeatedly roll them in the seasoning. Arrange on a broiler and broil for six minutes on each side. Remove, arrange on a dish, dress the onions on top of the steaks and serve.
A terse professional note rather than a full recipe: the steaks are seasoned, cooked and topped with onions that the book expects you to have fried elsewhere. Two things need translating — the equipment and the timing.
- "Arrange on a broiler"In a book of this period the broiler is a hinged wire gridiron set over live coals or a gas grill flame, cooking both faces in turn at close range. The nearest modern equivalent is a very hot ridged grill pan or an outdoor grill; an overhead oven broiler works but wants the rack in the top position and a long preheat.
- Timing is the weak pointTwelve minutes total on a flattened five-ounce sirloin gives grey meat all the way through. On properly hot metal a steak that size needs roughly two to three minutes a side for medium-rare; judge by feel or pull it at 130F internal and rest it five minutes.
- "Neatly flatten"Not pounding to a schnitzel — just an even thickness so the whole surface meets the heat at once. A few firm taps with the flat of a heavy knife or a cutlet bat is enough.
- The seasoning plateOil, salt and white pepper mixed on the plate and the steaks rolled in it repeatedly is a kitchen shortcut for oiling and seasoning in one move. One tablespoon of oil for six steaks is thin; a light film is the aim, and salt is easier to control if you salt the meat directly and use the oil separately.
- White pepperProbably chosen so no dark specks show on the plate. The two peppers do taste different, but black pepper will serve perfectly well in this dish if that is what you have.
- The missing onionsThe fried onions are not given here; the book evidently expects them from elsewhere. Two large onions, sliced thin and cooked slowly in butter or beef fat until deep brown, will dress six steaks; have them done and kept warm before the meat goes on the heat, since the steaks will not wait.
- YieldSix five-ounce steaks — one per person, six servings.
Steak with fried onions was one of the workhorse orders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century hotel and restaurant kitchen, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the clipped telegraphic style here — trim, roll, broil, dress, serve — is the voice of a chef writing for cooks who already knew the drill. Books of this kind collected several hundred such short dishes under national headings, an approach that treated European restaurant cookery as a single shared repertoire. Broiling in this period still meant fierce radiant heat and a cook standing over it, which is why the instruction is a flat count of minutes per side rather than any mention of temperature.