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Steak in the Saucepan
(Bistecca nel tegame) If you have a steak that does not appear to be too tender, put it in a saucepan with a little piece of butter and some good olive oil, with a taste of garlic and bay-leaf or rosemary. Add, if necessary, a little broth or water or tomato sauce and serve with potatoes cooked in the gravy that can be made more abundant with more broth, butter and tomato sauce.
This is a pan braise disguised as a steak recipe: the whole point is a tough cut cooked slowly in fat and liquid until it gives up. Treating it like a quick sear will produce exactly the leathery result the recipe was written to avoid.
- Tegame means a shallow panA tegame is a wide, low-sided skillet or sauté pan, not a deep stockpot and not an oven casserole. Width matters here, since the meat, the potatoes and the small amount of liquid all need to sit in one layer.
- Low heat, long timeBrown the meat briefly in the butter and oil, then drop the heat to a bare simmer, cover, and let it go 60 to 90 minutes depending on thickness. Chuck, blade or skirt suit this treatment; a modern tender steak does not and will only toughen.
- No quantities are givenWorking amounts for a 1 1/2 lb piece of meat: 1 tablespoon butter, 2 tablespoons olive oil, one crushed garlic clove, one bay leaf or a 3-inch sprig of rosemary, and about 1 cup of liquid added a little at a time as it cooks down.
- "A taste of garlic"Read this as one clove, lightly crushed and left whole, and lift it out before serving if you like. It is a background note, not a garlic sauce.
- Bay or rosemary, not bothThe original offers them as alternatives and they behave differently. Rosemary is assertive and wants to come out after 20 minutes; a bay leaf can stay in for the whole cooking.
- Salt is unmentionedPrinted recipes of this period routinely leave it out. Season the meat before browning and taste the gravy again at the end, particularly if you have used broth.
- The potatoesCut them into 1-inch pieces and add them for the last 30 to 35 minutes, turning them in the liquid so they take on the fat and tomato. If the pan looks dry, add broth in small splashes rather than flooding it.
- YieldA 1 1/2 lb piece with potatoes serves three to four as a main course.
This comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), a slim English-language compilation aimed at American households and drawing heavily on the tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi, whose self-published La scienza in cucina of 1891 came over the following decades to be regarded as the standard Italian domestic manual. The recipe's assumption is telling: a steak was not automatically a tender cut to be grilled but whatever slice the butcher had, and a cook was expected to judge on sight whether it needed the saucepan instead of the fire. That judgment underpins a whole family of Italian dishes named for the method rather than the meat -- in tegame, in umido, al forno -- where the cooking carries the identity. The finishing touch of potatoes cooked in the gravy, with more broth and butter added to make it stretch, is frugal cooking of a kind the book takes for granted and never bothers to explain.