In My Mother's Kitchen: Cube Steaks with Hasty-Tasty Sauce
Of the dishes I've posted in this series, most have not been unique to my mother. I've seen almost all of them on a restaurant menu at some point, and even for the more unusual ones like Fish with Almonds and Ham in Orange-Mustard Sauce at least the main ingredients turn up on menus with some regularity. In fact, the only dish I can think of that my mother made whose main ingredient I've never seen called out explicitly anywhere on a menu is Cube Steaks with Hasty-Tasty Sauce. Like most of my mother's recipes, I have no idea where this one came from.
Cube Steaks with Hasty-Tasty Sauce
4 cube steaks - about one pound
Salt & Pepper
Flour
Oil
1 Tsp dry mustard
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
3 Tbsp chili sauce or ketchup
2 Tbsp lemon juice
Cayenne (optional for tangier sauce)
1. Sprinkle steaks with salt & pepper to taste. Dust with flour.
2. Brown steaks in oil, quickly on both sides. Remove to plate.
3. Add remaining ingredients to skillet. Heat until boiling, stirring.
4. Return steaks to pan and coat with sauce. Serve.
When I was a kid, this was one of my very favorite non-pizza dishes. It also made great leftovers. I've never made it myself, and I'm not sure I've even had it once since I left for college. The sauce was very good on pasta or rice.
It's a little weird to me that there's an entire cut of beef that I cannot recall ever having seen on a menu, so I looked up cube steaks on wikipedia. If you can trust the internet, apparently they are also called minute steaks, which I've also not heard of, and they are frequently used in chicken fried steaks, which I have seen on menus and even had a time or two. Based on the descriptions there I would have thought I'd seen it listed as a cube steak on a traditional diner menu somewhere along the way, but if I have I certainly can't recall it, and it definitely didn't have this sauce.
On a very tangential note, my mother was big on couponing and sales. Grand Forks had a ton of different grocery stores for its size, including multiple Hugos, an Albertsons, a Red Owl, and various other places that opened as I got older, plus a bread outlet store. My mother always had gone through the circulars and knew where the staples were cheapest that week. She always had clipped coupons and knew they where they doubled. She also always checked out the discount "odds & ends" section in each store. At least one of the grocery stories had a discount section for meat, usually things that were coming up on the sell by dates. Since depending on which year it was we had anywhere from two to four freezers in our house, my mother would snag items from there and toss them in the freezer. And yes, that's not a typo, we really did have four freezers at one point:
- Fridge/freezer in kitchen room - my parents had brought the fridge from our previous house when we moved
- Fridge/freezer in utility room - the previous owners of our new home left their fridge
- small chest freezer in utility room - my mother's first chest freezer
- large chest freezer in utility room - my mother bought this when the small chest freezer proved inadequate. It was more than double the size of the small chest freezer. You could have put bodies in it.
At some point the small chest freezer died and was not replaced, and I think the basement fridge/freezer died after I went to college, but when all four were in operation they were usually pretty close to full of meat, bread, vegetables from both the store and the garden and whatever else my mother found. Leaving aside fresh fruit, fresh vegetables and milk between the freezers and the pantry my mother could have fed us for more than a month without any cut back in variety, portions or quality. She isn't a prepper, just good at planning. She didn't forget things in there either, it all got used.
Cube Steaks with Hasty-Tasty Sauce
4 cube steaks - about one pound
Salt & Pepper
Flour
Oil
1 Tsp dry mustard
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
3 Tbsp chili sauce or ketchup
2 Tbsp lemon juice
Cayenne (optional for tangier sauce)
1. Sprinkle steaks with salt & pepper to taste. Dust with flour.
2. Brown steaks in oil, quickly on both sides. Remove to plate.
3. Add remaining ingredients to skillet. Heat until boiling, stirring.
4. Return steaks to pan and coat with sauce. Serve.
When I was a kid, this was one of my very favorite non-pizza dishes. It also made great leftovers. I've never made it myself, and I'm not sure I've even had it once since I left for college. The sauce was very good on pasta or rice.
It's a little weird to me that there's an entire cut of beef that I cannot recall ever having seen on a menu, so I looked up cube steaks on wikipedia. If you can trust the internet, apparently they are also called minute steaks, which I've also not heard of, and they are frequently used in chicken fried steaks, which I have seen on menus and even had a time or two. Based on the descriptions there I would have thought I'd seen it listed as a cube steak on a traditional diner menu somewhere along the way, but if I have I certainly can't recall it, and it definitely didn't have this sauce.
On a very tangential note, my mother was big on couponing and sales. Grand Forks had a ton of different grocery stores for its size, including multiple Hugos, an Albertsons, a Red Owl, and various other places that opened as I got older, plus a bread outlet store. My mother always had gone through the circulars and knew where the staples were cheapest that week. She always had clipped coupons and knew they where they doubled. She also always checked out the discount "odds & ends" section in each store. At least one of the grocery stories had a discount section for meat, usually things that were coming up on the sell by dates. Since depending on which year it was we had anywhere from two to four freezers in our house, my mother would snag items from there and toss them in the freezer. And yes, that's not a typo, we really did have four freezers at one point:
- Fridge/freezer in kitchen room - my parents had brought the fridge from our previous house when we moved
- Fridge/freezer in utility room - the previous owners of our new home left their fridge
- small chest freezer in utility room - my mother's first chest freezer
- large chest freezer in utility room - my mother bought this when the small chest freezer proved inadequate. It was more than double the size of the small chest freezer. You could have put bodies in it.
At some point the small chest freezer died and was not replaced, and I think the basement fridge/freezer died after I went to college, but when all four were in operation they were usually pretty close to full of meat, bread, vegetables from both the store and the garden and whatever else my mother found. Leaving aside fresh fruit, fresh vegetables and milk between the freezers and the pantry my mother could have fed us for more than a month without any cut back in variety, portions or quality. She isn't a prepper, just good at planning. She didn't forget things in there either, it all got used.