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Broiled Steak with Mushrooms
In a sauce pan put one tablespoonful of butter and one tablespoonful of flour and cook over the fire until well browned. Add one tablespoonful of soft butter, three tablespoonfuls of rich stock and half a cupful of the liquor in which the mushrooms have been cooked. Stir until smooth and thick, then add one-half of a teaspoonful of salt, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of white pepper and onehalf of the mushrooms cut in quarters, simmer for seven minutes. Trim any superfluous fat from the steak and wipe with a damp cloth. Rub the broiler with a bit of fat and arrange the steak in it. Broil over a clear fire, turning the broiler every ten seconds; if liked very rare seven minutes will be sufficient, twice that length of time if it is to be well done. Have ready a hot platter; dust both sides of the meat with salt and pepper just before it is removed from the fire, transfer to the platter, spread over it the mushrooms and sauce and serve.
A hand-broiled steak with a brown-butter sauce built on mushroom liquor. The recipe assumes you have already stewed the mushrooms in butter and a little water or stock and saved the liquid — do that first, or the sauce has nothing to stand on.
- The hinge: cook the roux dark, then keep it smoothButter and flour are browned to a genuine brown roux before any liquid goes in — that colour is the whole flavour of the sauce. Add the warm mushroom liquor and stock gradually off direct heat and stir hard, or the second tablespoon of soft butter and the flour will separate into a greasy sauce.
- Mushroom liquorHalf a cup of the strained cooking liquid from the mushrooms. If your mushrooms gave up less than that, top up with stock rather than plain water; the sauce is only three tablespoons of stock otherwise and needs the body.
- "Rich stock"A reduced brown veal or beef stock, gelatinous when cold. Commercial low-sodium beef broth is much thinner — reduce a cup down to a few spoonfuls, and hold back some of the half teaspoon of salt until you taste at the end.
- A clear fireHardwood coals burned down past the flame, with no smoke. The modern equivalent is a charcoal grill after the coals have ashed over, or a gas grill run hot; an overhead oven broiler works but gives no chance to turn the meat every ten seconds usefully.
- The double broiler and the ten-second turnThe hinged wire broiler held the steak so it could be flipped constantly, which sears both faces without letting either scorch. With tongs on a grate the effect is the same — turn often rather than once. Constant turning genuinely cooks more evenly than the single-flip orthodoxy.
- Times assume a thick steakSeven minutes very rare, fourteen well done, implies a fairly thick steak over hot coals, perhaps 1 to 1 1/2 inches; the recipe names no cut. Go by an instant-read thermometer instead: 125F for rare, 135F medium-rare, 145F medium. A thin supermarket steak will be past well done in seven minutes.
- Salting at the endSalt and pepper go on just before the steak leaves the fire, presumably to keep the surface dry while it browns; the recipe does not say why. If you prefer to salt ahead, do it at least 40 minutes out so the moisture drawn up is reabsorbed.
- White pepperChosen for its slightly fermented, earthy note; white pepper was also the convention in sauces where dark specks were unwanted, though this particular sauce is itself brown. Black pepper is not an even swap in flavour, though it does no harm.
- YieldThe sauce quantity suits a steak for two to three. Rest the meat a few minutes on the hot platter before saucing; the juices that collect are worth stirring into the pan.
The technique here belongs to the era of the hinged wire broiler, a wire cage on a long handle that let a cook hold meat directly over coals in a range firebox or on the hearth and flip it constantly. Gas broilers were appearing in city kitchens around the turn of the century but were far from universal, so household manuals of the period still gave instructions in terms of a "clear fire" — coals with the smoke burned off, since smoke from flaring fat was thought to taint the meat. The sauce is a plain brown roux enriched with raw butter stirred in at the end, loosely comparable to what French practice would call a demi-glace finished au beurre; American cookbooks of the period absorbed a good deal of that vocabulary while quietly dropping the multi-day stock work behind it. Cultivated mushrooms were still relatively costly in the United States at the time, grown commercially in cellars and caves, which may be why the recipe makes use of their cooking liquor.