La Battecarne e la BisNonna
When I was experimenting the other day with crusca/bran for breading meat, I remembered a recipe I had read years ago, probably in one of my antique magazines. The recipe was for Swiss steak, a dish for which I never developed much passion. The instructions, however, have much to say about kitchen history.
I can’t check it, but I believe the recipe was from between 1919 and 1939. That’s my guess because the recipe was for several to many people, used and even centered about a cheap piece of meat and yet was spicy and used tomatoes. In the United States, tomatoes weren’t very much used in family meals, and spices had more to do with desserts than entrees, except in ethnic cookery. Ethnic cookery was something you wouldn’t expect the average American magazine reader to know about or even want to do until after the Second World War. Meat didn’t center meals much during the rationing days of the war, and the numbers being fed dropped off, too, with most men and boys serving in the military.
I noticed that many recipes were for eight people in early 20th century, dropped to four quite often around wartime, and then popped back to six in the Fifties. There are many reasons why this would be true. One was that there were often household help before the war, and several children, and after the war women were encouraged to marry and have babies again, and because there was money once more, they did.
Anyway, to the recipe. The directions were to take a piece of round steak and cut it into moderate sized pieces. The pieces were then put on a cutting board, scattered with flour and then the flour was beaten into the meat with the edge of a plate. Look at the edge of a plate. It’s not a very big thing. As a matter of fact, you’d spend hours beating flour into steak for six using the edge of a plate.
Effective? I suspect it is. I am not going to try it or time it. By the time I started cooking most people had a meat hammer with various sized teeth that did the job better and faster. My mother called it a meat hammer. Hers was made of wood, and I once had a wooden one, too, but I snapped the neck of the handle being particularly vigorous one day, so all the ensuing ones have been cast aluminum. For delicate jobs, like flattening chicken or fish, I used the untoothed side of the hammer or the bottom of a wine bottle. If one wants to be showy, a wine bottle still works for slamming, banging, beating or crushing many things, but it can, of course, break.
I have my American meat hammer with me, but I also bought a battecarne which does a much slicker job of flattening delicate things than the wine bottle ever did. For tenderizing tough meat, nothing beats beating.
But every once in a while it’s interesting to me to imagine the women who came before me and how they did the same things I do. I may not make Swiss steak, but a lot of my nicest dishes start with a chunk of something that must be turned into feather-light and tender slices or slivers of something.
And then, for the Southerners, there is chicken-fried steak, and I bet that a lot of grandmothers used the edge of a plate to make that, too. The next time you turn to zap something in the microwave, think about the women who fed your grandparents and how much sheer muscle power and ingenuity it took to do it. Think about the Sunday night suppers with word games and charades or board games that were quite common, even among people who weren’t at all affluent. Those were hard times, but they were also generous times and with no mod cons at all, people had a lot of fun and ate the best they knew how to, on much less money than we spend.
I don’t propose that we go back to privation budgets or appliance-free kitchens– far from it! I do propose that we consider turning off the TV occasionally, feed our friends something cheap and filling and creatively entertain ourselves. We are losing some of the sense of home lately, because we are being convinced that entertaining needs to be elaborate or formalized or that the food should be like restaurant food. Maybe once a month it would be worth wondering what great-grandma would have done.
Some of you are doing this, and you are the ones who inspired this post. Hello, Snowpea!
2 comments March 27th, 2007
