Filete Estofar con Cebollas
Region: Jewish Mediterranean, Spanish
Category: Beef
Season: Any
Difficulty: Easy and Quick
Andrès Bernaldez, the chaplain of the Grand Inquisitor and historiographer of the Catholic kings, said, concerning the Marranos, Jews who converted to Christianity:
The Jews have never lost their way of eating. They prepare their meat with onions and garlic and fry them in oil which they use in place of lard, because they do not eat lard. And oil with meat is something which gives a very bad odor by their breath and thus their houses smell bad. And this odor is called the Jewish smell.
I wonder if this Jewish style of preparing beef with onions moved east with the Sephardim in the sixteenth century and then west again to eventually cross the Atlantic and settle on Long Island, New York. I lived on Long Island in the 1960s, and many diners were Jewish-owned and they always offered a menu entree called “Roumanian steak,” which I was crazy about and always ordered. It was beef skirt steak smothered with lots of caramelized browned onions fried in olive oil. It was a delicious dish, and this recipe will give you a chance to try it, although skirt steak (cut from the diaphragm), for some reason, is increasingly hard to find. After enjoying this preparation you will see that Bernaldez was as wrong as the Inquisition.
Yield: Makes 2 servings
Preparation Time: 25 minutes
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 large onion (about 1 pound), sliced thin
1 large garlic clove, chopped
One ¾-pound skirt steak
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat, then cook the onions and garlic together until the onions begin to brown, about 15 minutes, stirring frequently so the garlic doesn’t burn.
2. Add the skirt steak, season with salt and pepper, and continue cooking until rare or medium rare, about 8 minutes, turning occasionally. Serve the meat covered with the onions.
Variation:
Note:
The recipe is easily doubled.
Posted: 01/21/2009
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