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Broiled Steak Sandwich
Between slices of lightly buttered white bread, place a thin piece of hot broiled steak, season with salt and pepper. Garnish top with a thin slice of Bermuda onion.
A steak sandwich stripped to its essentials, and it lives or dies on the cut and the carving. The original assumes a cook who broils steak daily and knows what "thin" means.
- The hinge: slice thin, across the grain"A thin piece of hot broiled steak" most likely means a steak broiled and then carved thin, though the text does not say so outright. Whichever way, cut on a slight bias against the grain so the meat yields to a bite rather than pulling out of the bread in one piece.
- Choosing the cutThe usual period broiling steaks were sirloin and porterhouse; flank was sometimes broiled but more often braised. Any of these still works; skirt, flat iron and hanger are good modern equivalents and carve well thin.
- Broiling in 1900Broiling in the period -- The book's broiling means direct high heat over coals or under a gas grill's flame. A modern broiler element on high, or a heavy cast-iron pan, gives a comparable result in 3-4 minutes a side for a steak about an inch thick.
- Rest before carvingNot mentioned in the original, but the sandwich is built with hot meat and the juices will soak straight into the lower slice of bread unless the steak sits five minutes first. Some soaking is desirable; a puddle is not.
- Bermuda onionA large, mild, flat-topped sweet onion, familiar in American markets through the later nineteenth century. A Vidalia, Walla Walla or ordinary sweet white onion is a reasonable stand-in; a sharp yellow storage onion is not, and raw would dominate.
- "Garnish top"The onion sits on the finished sandwich as a garnish rather than inside it. Tucking it under the top slice is the more practical modern reading.
- The breadWhite sandwich loaf, lightly buttered as the recipe directs; butter helps hold the crumb against the meat juices. The original says nothing about trimming the crusts.
- YieldOne steak of 8-10 oz, carved thin, fills three to four sandwiches.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to a run of American cookery books published in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the sandwich moved from a picnic and railway convenience into the formal repertoire of luncheon, tea and club dining. Its recipes are terse because they were written for cooks who already knew how to broil a steak and needed only the assembly. The Bermuda onion here suggests something of the book's period: mild sweet onions shipped from Bermuda were a recognised luxury import in American markets, prized because they could be eaten raw without the harshness of a storage onion, and the name outlived the trade to become a general term for any large flat sweet onion. The steak sandwich itself needs no origin story beyond the availability of both halves.