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Hamburg Steak with Fried Onions
Pass through a Salisbury chopping machine two pounds lean, raw rump of beef, lay it on a plate, add one good-sized, finely chopped sound onion, first fried in a teaspoon butter for three minutes. Season with one teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, one tablespoon finely chopped parsley and one whole raw egg. Mix all well together, then divide the meat into six equal parts. Roll them in flour and give them a nice fish-cake form. Heat three-quarters of an ounce butter in a frying pan. Slide in the steaks and fry them for six minutes on each side. Remove, drain well, dress on a hot dish, pour over their own gravy. Arrange the fried onions around the steak and serve very hot.
A straightforward chopped steak, but the original assumes you are grinding your own beef and leaves the garnish onions unaccounted for.
- Salisbury chopping machineA hand-cranked meat chopper; the name appears to be a proprietary one, though the maker is not certain. Ask the butcher to coarse-grind two pounds of trimmed rump, or grind cubed chilled rump yourself on the coarse plate; pre-packed fine ground beef makes a pastier patty.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. The nutmeg is meant to be barely detectable, so measure rather than shake.
- The fried onions of the titleThe recipe folds one fried onion into the meat and then tells you to arrange fried onions around the finished steaks without ever calling for them. Allow two or three more onions, sliced and cooked slowly in butter until deep gold, started before the meat so they are ready when the patties come out.
- Butter quantityThree-quarters of an ounce is about 1½ tablespoons for six patties in one pan, which is thin. Use a heavy skillet, work in two batches, and add butter as needed; a little oil alongside keeps it from browning too fast over twelve minutes.
- "Fish-cake form"Round and thick, roughly an inch high and three inches across, rather than the flat modern burger. That shape is what makes the twelve-minute total cooking sensible instead of ruinous.
- FlouringThe flour coat is there for crust and to hold the surface together. Roll them just before they go in the pan, or the flour goes damp and gummy.
- Timing and donenessSix minutes a side over moderate heat suits patties of this thickness and should bring ground beef past 160F, which is where ground meat should be. If yours are flatter, cut the time; go by an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock.
- "Their own gravy"No separate sauce is intended. Pour off excess fat, add a splash of water or stock to the pan, scrape up the browned bits and spoon that over.
- YieldSix patties, six servings as written, though at a third of a pound of raw beef each they are generous by modern portioning.
Hamburg steak reached American and English cookbooks in the later nineteenth century as a dish of the German port cities, and its early identity was as an invalid and dyspeptic's food as much as a chophouse plate: finely minced lean beef was thought easier to digest than a whole cut, an idea also behind the Salisbury steak named for the physician James Salisbury, who promoted chopped-beef diets. Its place in a book called The International Cook Book reflects how such compilations of the 1900s and 1910s organised themselves by nation, presenting to American readers a Germany represented by beef, onions, nutmeg and parsley. The instruction to shape the mixture like a fish cake is a useful reminder that the flat griddle burger in a bun was not yet the default meaning of chopped beef; this is a thick pan-fried cake meant to be eaten from a plate with a knife and fork.