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Baked Beefsteak
Season the meat with salt and pepper, and dredge with flour. Have some butter hot in the pan, in which place the beefsteak and bake half an hour.
Four lines with no weight, no temperature and no cut named — typical of turn-of-the-century books, which assumed the cook already knew what a steak looked like and how her range behaved. The gaps are fillable if you read the timing carefully.
- What "bake" means hereThis is oven cooking in an open pan with hot butter, not covered braising and not broiling. On a coal or early gas range that would be the ordinary baking oven; the recipe gives no temperature, so any modern figure is a guess.
- The half hour tells you the cutThirty minutes in a hot oven will destroy a modern 1-inch sirloin or ribeye. The timing suggests a thick steak of two inches or more, or a thick slice of round.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockIgnore the half hour and use a thermometer: 125-130F at the centre for medium-rare, 135-140F for medium. A thick round steak taken past that turns dry and stringy rather than tender.
- Dredging with flourThe flour is there to brown and to thicken the butter and meat juices into a rough pan gravy. Season first, flour second, and shake off the excess or it goes pasty.
- Get the butter genuinely hot"Hot in the pan" means hot enough to sear on contact. Butter alone will brown and can burn at oven heat; a mix of butter and a neutral oil, or clarified butter, holds up better. Use an oven-safe skillet and sear on the stovetop before the pan goes in.
- Quantity and yieldNo amount is given. A steak of about 1 1/2 to 2 lb serves three to four; season with roughly 1 tsp salt and a good grind of pepper, and 2 tbsp butter is enough for a 10-inch pan.
- Resting and slicingRest the meat ten minutes before cutting, then slice thin across the grain — worth doing with round.
If this appears under sandwiches, a cold baked steak sliced thin would make a sandwich filling; the claim that the recipe was written to produce next-day slicing meat is not something the four lines support. Baking a steak rather than broiling it suited the closed-range era: as cast-iron cookstoves replaced the open hearth through the nineteenth century, the direct radiant heat that made a broiled steak possible became harder to come by in many households, and the oven took over. Flouring the meat before it met hot butter served double duty, giving a browned crust and a little thickening for whatever juices collected in the pan. The brevity is characteristic of the genre — a household compendium like this one assumed its reader knew the fire, the pan and the cut, and needed only the order of operations.