Swiss Steak was what Christina mentioned making for dinner yesterday in Karen's dinner thread, and it sparked a completely forgotten memory from childhood for me: pieces 3/4" thick meat, a cut that when I was a child in Southern California was called "sirloin tips" but which we would recognize today as thick slices of tri tip, browned and braised for hours in gravy (no doubt primed with Kitchen Bouquet, which mom loved) and onions in an electric skillet. Mom used that electric skillet only for this and fried chicken, so it was always exciting to me when this big Faberware appliance came out even though, hating well done beef in any form, I didn't look forward to the meal.
I haven't had Swiss Steak since.
So I had to go do some digging. It was no surprise to find out, firstly, that you can't order this dish in Zurich. Giving something a foreign name back in the day was a linguistic way of identifying something as different from the normal way of doing things, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and swissing , according to John Mariani's Dictionary of American Food & Drink , was an English term for rolling and pounding cloth flat which was then adopted as a food term for the process of pounding flour into meat as a preparation for braising.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines swiss steak thusly: "A round steak pounded with flour and braised in stock with vegetables." Webster's agrees, and mentions "smothered steak" as another name for the same dish. James Beard's 1949 The Fireside Cookbook mentions simply a braised beef "sometimes called Swiss Steak."
Cooking in America 1840-1945 by Alice McLean agrees. The base recipe cited by every one of these sources involves tougher cuts (round, chuck or shoulder) treated to a long, slow braise with acidic canned tomatoes as the base of the braising liquid. The recipe differs mildly in quantities, but basically they are conceptually the same recipe as appears in Bob's grandmother's 1943 edition of the Better Homes and Garden Cookbook (and amusingly, very unlike my mother's.) It is approximately 2 lbs of beef and 1/2 cup or more of flour, wherein the flour is "pounded into the meat until the meat will accept no more", browned in drippings, and then braised with a can of tomatoes, chopped onion and whatever stock or water is needed to create enough braising liquid. Salt and pepper are the only two seasonings.
According to Silvia Lovegren's Seven Decades of Fashionable Food , though the recipe first appeared in print in 1924, it didn't appear in cookbooks until the 40's "the method points to Pennsylvania Dutch origins" but that's conjecture and there's no evidence of who first made the dish. Regional cookbooks of the time describe it as a Wyoming specialty, and it was also spotted by one Clementine Paddleford in Indiana. What does seem undisputed is that it's popularity surged during the post-WWII years when the better, tenderer cuts of beef became too expensive for the average pocketbook.
