Chipped Beef Gravy With Evaporated Milk Salsbury Steak
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Saving the Salisbury Steak From TV-Dinner Obscurity
I used to think I had a thing for old recipes. I've learned that this self-observation (like most of my impressions of myself) was wrong. I've actually followed "old recipes" probably twice. I once faithfully reproduced a "clam loaf." I don't know if it was my fault or the recipe's, or maybe even the concept's, but the result was inedible, and a little scary, and I arrived at the party I'd promised to bring it to holding a can of compensatory Spanish cockles. And I once made an antique "sauce piquant" with bone marrow, spooned it over a roast and coughed politely as murmurs round the table confirmed my impression that it tasted like old fish. We ate a lot of bread.
What I've realized is that I like dreaming about what old dishes would be. I like imagining where they would be eaten and by whom, how they might be served, what conversation and convention punctuate their eating, what time of day, what weather, what energies drive eaters to that table and from it. I do like reading their instructions. I just don't like to follow them. I like to take what I can. It's sometimes a particularly good way of describing one step of a process, or the suggestion of a way of life — involving long lunches and wild strawberries — or a really wonderful general idea for a dish, with a lovely and evocative name.
Salisbury steak is such an instance: a good idea and a good name, though its reputation as a TV dinner has stained the prettiness somewhat. Salisbury steak, the preparation — hand-chopped meat formed into a patty and cooked in fat — probably originated in unnamed kitchens wherever cattle grazed. It definitively existed on the menus of fine Swiss and French restaurants here and in their native lands throughout the late-19th and early-20th centuries as biftek haché, Hamburg steak or haché de boeuf.
The innocent ruddy mixture appeared under its new name in 1888 in a recipe by a Dr. Salisbury, a 19th-century physician with potent, and extreme, ideas about diet and health. Here is Salisbury's recipe — which in its tone and intention (as a nutritional plan) blurs the distinction between "recipe" as we understand it and pharmaceutical "receipts" for prevention and cures that were once regular companions to cooking instruction. "Eat the muscle pulp of lean beef made into cakes and broiled," he wrote. "Simply press it sufficiently to hold it together. Make the cakes from half an inch to an inch thick. Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire free from blaze and smoke. When cooked, put it on a hot plate and season to taste with butter, pepper, salt; also use either Worcestershire or Halford sauce, mustard, horseradish or lemon juice on the meat if desired."
How many times it was recreated in that naïve, wholesome form, I don't know. By 1962, according to a book I have from that year, titled "Meats," and similar volumes, recipes for Salisbury steak had become burial grounds for convenience foods. One in "Meats" reads: "1 lb. ground beef, 1/2 cup cream or evaporated milk . . . flour, bacon drippings or margarine . . . Worcestershire sauce . . . 1 4 oz. can mushrooms, undrained. . . ." (This is succeeded by a recipe for Savory Beef Burgers that begins: "1 1/2 cups Rice Krispies. . . . ")
Other than the silver sound of the name "Salisbury," the usefulness residing in the doctor's words is that good hamburgers are delicious without their buns. And luckily, there are many ways to lift them up without condensed milk or Rice Krispies (or Halford sauce).
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In a 1982 recipe for The New York Times, Pierre Franey called for ground sirloin mixed with Gorgonzola cheese, flattened into patties and griddled in cast iron before a flaming in cognac — you can almost hear the opening bars of "Le Marseillaise" through the blue flames. Perhaps my favorite chopped steak (which is what steak haché means) is another by Pierre Franey, in The Chicago Tribune, called "steak hache (hamburger) with an egg rider." You grill sirloin patties, fry one egg per and top the burgers with them, then lay anchovy fillets around the yolks of the freshly cooked eggs. Then you sizzle a handful of capers and chopped parsley in hot butter and pour it over each beef-egg-and-anchovy stack. (In a flash of heathen inspiration, I have devised an artless inversion of Franey's method, cooking a small, fatty sirloin patty quickly until well browned outside and still almost bloody within. I then pour all the fatty juices from the pan over a halved, lightly boiled egg. The hot juices cook the egg a bit further, and marinate and warm it. I eat the egg and sirloin together over a mix of young lettuces, thinking: Now this is a fine way to eat steak and eggs!)
My contribution to the category is actually by my husband, Peter. He was forced more than inspired to its creation. I was trying different combinations of herbs and herb butter and herb sauces and dried mushrooms and other savories in an attempt to come up with a Salisbury-esque chopped steak. I asked Peter how he thought it should all be combined, and he used a little bit of everything. This means keeping the midcentury habit of mushrooms — a good idea. It also means some finicky deftness because of all the chopping and the number of sauces: two! Though I wouldn't have devised his rules, I obey them here, and it probably makes this version closer to really old than others I trim of all their steps but about one.
It goes without saying — or perhaps more correctly with what I have already said — that these buttered, herby chopped steaks do not need buns. Nor do they need the mechanical partnership of potatoes. They look and taste as good accompanied by buttery rice or a chicory salad as by spuds. If you do want your meat and potatoes to be meat and potatoes, then little ones, wedged and put in a hot oven in a cast-iron pan with a good deal of olive oil or duck fat are particularly fine.
Recipe: Mon Pierre's Steak Haché
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/magazine/salisbury-steak-recipe-chopped-meat.html
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