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Broiled Steak
(English chop-house recipe.) Mix 1 tablespoonful of olive oil, a teaspoonful of salt, and a pinch of pepper. Rub this over the steak and set it aside with the sauce on it for 2 hours, in a cold place. Drain it, put it on a broiler, and sear it quickly, then cook it slowly, putting a few ashes over the hot fire, for about 10 minutes. When the meat looks puffy, but being careful to lose none of the juice, remove to a hot dish and place a bit of butter on top. Garnish with parsley.
A gridiron recipe, not an oven one. The whole method turns on having two levels of heat available, one fierce and one gentle.
- "Broiler" means a grill"Broiler" means a gridiron set over live coals -- often a hinged wire frame -- and the fire was banked with ashes to knock the heat down after searing, exactly as the recipe directs. The modern equivalent is a two-zone charcoal fire, or a grill with one burner high and one low; a hot cast-iron pan and a low oven will approximate it.
- The hinge: sear hot, finish gentleEverything else is garnish. Get a hard crust on both sides over maximum heat, then move the steak away from the fire and let it come up slowly. Trying to do the whole thing over the searing heat is what produces a grey band under the crust.
- "A cold place"A larder or icebox then, the refrigerator now. Two hours with oil, salt and pepper on the surface works something like a light dry brine, though in that time the salt only reaches the outer layers rather than sitting entirely on top. Bring the steak back toward room temperature for 20-30 minutes before it meets the fire.
- "Drain it"Take this seriously and blot the surface dry. Oil left pooling on the meat flares and smokes over coals, and a wet surface will not brown.
- Ten minutes, and what it assumesThe timing suits a chop-house cut of perhaps an inch, though the recipe never states a thickness. Thicker steaks need proportionally longer on the cool side, and it is unclear whether the quick searing is meant to be counted within the ten minutes.
- "When the meat looks puffy"An old visual cue for the interior firming and beginning to swell; what doneness it actually marks is a matter of judgement. A thermometer is more reliable: roughly 125-130F for rare to medium-rare, 135-145F for medium, read at the centre.
- Rest before servingThe recipe warns against losing juice but sends the steak straight to the table. Five to eight minutes on the hot dish, with the butter melting over it, does more to keep the juice in than any amount of careful handling.
- YieldA single chop-house steak, one generous portion, or two if it is a large sirloin sliced across the grain.
The English chop-house was a plain city eating-house built around a coal fire and a gridiron, where a cut was broiled and arrived with butter and little else. That austerity is the point of this recipe, and the reason it reads as a technique rather than a dish. The trick of scattering ashes over the coals belongs to solid-fuel cookery, where you cannot turn a knob; damping the surface of the fire was the standard way to convert a searing heat into a moderate one without moving the meat far. The recipe appears here tagged simply as an English chop-house recipe, taken as proof that plain grilling done attentively needs no sauce.