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Small Steaks with Fried Onions
Procure six small, tender steaks of five ounces each. Season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add the steaks and gently fry them for five minutes on each side, dress on a dish and keep hot.
Finely slice two Spanish onions, detach the rings, and season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; mix well in the seasoning, lightly roll in flour, and fry them in boiling fat for five minutes. Lift them up, drain, place them over the steaks and serve.
A plain steak-and-onions formula whose only real technique is the onion fry. The steaks are small enough that five minutes a side will take them well past medium.
- "Small steaks of five ounces"These are single-portion cuts, most likely minute steaks, small sirloins or thin-cut tenderloin medallions. At 5 oz and typical thickness, five minutes per side in butter gives a firmly well-done steak; two to three minutes a side is closer to medium-rare if that is what you want.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons pepper" is half a teaspoon. The total seasoning across the dish is generous but not out of line for six portions.
- Butter alone will burnA tablespoon and a half of butter over the heat needed to colour six steaks will brown and then scorch. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, holds up better; wipe the pan between batches if the milk solids blacken.
- Cook in batchesSix steaks are unlikely to fit in one frying pan without steaming; two or three at a time, with the cooked ones held on the warm dish, sits comfortably with "dress on a dish and keep hot," though the recipe itself gives no instruction to divide them.
- "Boiling fat"This means deep fat at frying temperature, around 350-375F, not literally boiling. Five minutes at that heat is long for floured onion rings; check at three and pull them when deep gold, since Spanish onions are sweet and their sugars colour fast.
- Spanish onionsLarge, mild, pale-skinned onions. Any large sweet or yellow onion substitutes directly. Slicing thin and separating the rings before flouring keeps them from frying in clumps.
- FlouringSeason the onions first, then flour, as written; salt draws out enough surface moisture for the flour to cling. Fry soon after coating or the flour turns to paste.
- YieldSix servings, one steak each. Rest the meat while the onions fry and pour any pan juices over before the onions go on, or the crust will sit in liquid.
Steak with fried onions belongs to a broadly international hotel repertoire: a dish with no single national claim, and one often said to be cooked much the same wherever such kitchens operated. The Spanish onion is doing specific work here. Large, mild and sweet, it was generally favoured for frying and for raw use in Anglo-American cookery of the period, rather than the sharper, smaller onions kept for stocks and stews. The instruction to season the rings, flour them and drop them into deep fat is much the same method associated with what later became the fried onion ring, served in this era as a garnish over meat rather than as a dish on its own.