Hamburger Steak
1 pound top round, or flank inch thick 1 cup boiling water or stock Chop finely one pound lean raw beef; season highly with salt, pepper and a few drops of onion juice. Add 1/4 cup milk gradually; mix with a fork and shape into cakes. Heat a frying pan, rub with the fat of meat and pan-broil the steaks. Turn cakes often during the cooking. FLANK OR ROUND STEAK, STUFFED AND ROLLED 1 pound top round, or 2 or 3 small slices suet flank 1/2 inch thick 1 cup crumbs 2 tablespoons butter (melted) cup carrot, cubed 1 onion, sliced
A plain pan-broiled beef patty from the era before the hamburger sandwich took over the name. Two things need attention: the fractions have dropped out of the printed text, and "pan-broil" is not frying.
- Missing fractionsThe original reads "Add cup milk" — a vulgar fraction has been lost in printing, as it has again in the stuffed-steak recipe that follows ("cup crumbs", "cup carrot"). For a pound of beef, a quarter cup of milk is the plausible reading; a full cup would make a batter rather than a mixture you can shape.
- Chop, do not grind"Chop finely" means hand-chopped with a knife or two knives, which leaves irregular pieces and a looser, juicier cake. The recipe calls for lean beef; commercial ground beef can stand in, but handle it as little as possible — pressing it firm is what makes these dense.
- Onion juiceGrate half an onion on a box grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. A few drops is genuinely a few drops; the point is aroma without wet pulp in the meat.
- Pan-broilingA dry, very hot heavy pan — cast iron at medium-high — wiped with a scrap of beef fat, not a pool of it. Any liquid that gathers should be poured off so the cakes brown rather than stew.
- Turning oftenThis is not the modern once-only instruction, and the old advice is sound: turning every 45 seconds or so cooks the interior more evenly and builds crust on both faces. Figure six to eight minutes total for cakes about three-quarters of an inch thick.
- DonenessThe book gives no internal temperature. Because the meat is chopped rather than whole, cook to 160F if using supermarket ground beef; the surface bacteria are distributed throughout once meat is cut up.
- YieldOne pound makes four cakes of about four ounces, or three generous ones.
In American cookbooks of this period "Hamburger steak" means exactly what it says — a steak of chopped beef, seasoned and cooked in a pan, served on a plate with a knife and fork and no bread in sight. The name is generally traced to the beef preparations associated with the port of Hamburg and carried into American eating houses by German immigrants in the nineteenth century; the sandwich form only crowded out the plate form later. Chopped beef stretched the cheaper cuts, and the technique required nothing but a frying pan.