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Pepper Steak
1 pound tender, round steak, sliced 1/2 inch thick 3 green peppers 1/2 tablespoon Karo, Blue Label 1½ cups meat stock 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 3/4 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons Mazola Cube the meat. Wash the peppers, remove the seeds and cores, and dice. Heat the Mazola in a medium-sized frying pan, add the Karo and brown the meat and peppers in it, cooking about seven minutes. Stir in the cornstarch and seasonings and gradually the stock. (Water may be substituted.) Boil three minutes and serve on rice.
A brand-book recipe from the Corn Products Refining Company, so every branded item is one of its own: Mazola corn oil, Argo/Kingsford's cornstarch, Karo syrup. Ordinary equivalents work.
- The hinge: keep the meat small and the cooking shortRound steak is lean and turns tough with long cooking. The recipe says only to cube the half-inch slices; cut them small, so that seven minutes over fairly high heat is enough to brown them through. Larger chunks may still be underdone when the pan time is up.
- Karo, Blue LabelA light corn syrup of the period, generally described as fuller-flavoured than the Crystal White grade. Any light corn syrup stands in. Half a tablespoon in a pound of meat is presumably there to help browning rather than to sweeten.
- Mazola and the panThree tablespoons of corn oil is a generous amount for a pound of meat in a modern nonstick pan; two is usually enough in cast iron or steel. Refined corn oil does have a fairly high smoke point, which suits this hard, fast browning, though it is named here because it is the sponsor's product.
- Avoiding lumpsThe recipe's own order works if the stock goes in gradually and the starch is well dispersed in the fat first. If you are unsure, whisk the tablespoon of starch into a few tablespoons of cold stock, add the rest of the stock to the pan, then pour in the slurry.
- Boil three minutesThis is not arbitrary. Cornstarch needs to reach a full boil and hold it briefly to lose its raw taste and set its thickness; pulled off too soon the sauce thins again as it sits.
- Green peppersDiced peppers added at the start with the meat will be soft and browned rather than crisp, which is what the recipe intends. If you want them with some bite, add them for the last two or three minutes.
- StockA cup and a half of unsalted or low-sodium broth; the three-quarter teaspoon of salt assumes the stock brings none of its own. Taste before adding it all if using commercial broth.
- YieldThree modest luncheon servings over rice, or two generous ones. Allow about three cups of cooked rice.
This is pepper steak in an early American home form: a stir-fry of beef and green peppers, translated for the home cook with a frying pan and no soy sauce, no ginger and no garlic. What remains of the technique is the essential part: meat browned fast, vegetables in the same fat, a cornstarch-thickened pan sauce, rice underneath. The book itself is promotional literature from the Corn Products Refining Company, which is why one pound of steak calls for four proprietary ingredients, all of them made from corn; such branded cookbooks were a standard advertising vehicle of the era, distributed free or for a few cents and written to make the sponsor's products indispensable to recipes that had previously used butter, flour and sugar.