The regional table / Oklahoma
Chicken-Fried Steak with Cream Gravy
The Oklahoma Legislature put this on a list of what the state eats, which is a rare thing for a dish invented to make cheap beef edible.
In 1988 the Forty-first Legislature passed House Concurrent Resolution 1083 and gave Oklahoma an official state meal, with 19 April of that year proclaimed Oklahoma Meal Day. The menu it named runs to eleven items — barbecued pork, chicken-fried steak, sausage with biscuits and gravy, fried okra, squash, grits, corn, black-eyed peas, cornbread, strawberries and pecan pie — and three of them, this one included, are dishes in this batch. I could not read the enrolled text: concurrent resolutions from the 1988 session are not in the Legislature's online bill system, which returns Not Found for HCR 1083, so what I have is the Oklahoma Historical Society's account of it, in Dianna Everett's Encyclopedia entry on the state meal and in the OHS list of state emblems. Both give the same menu and the same resolution number, and Everett notes drily that the resolution never says whether the gravy on the biscuits is the red-eye kind or the white.
On the steak itself the best source is also OHS: Bobby D. Weaver's Encyclopedia entry, published in January 2010, which sets out the method — round steak cut thin, beaten with whatever is to hand, dipped in milk and egg, dredged in flour with baking powder, salt and pepper, fried in a skillet, and the gravy made from the crispies left behind. Weaver is honest about the history in a way the restaurant folklore is not: the origins are impossible to determine, the nineteenth-century cookbooks print the same dish as pan-fried or country-fried steak, and as late as 1930 The Bride's Cook Book of Oklahoma City still called it breaded steak. The name, he writes, probably came out of the 1930s and was standard by the Second World War. The open newspaper record agrees. Searching the Georgia historic newspapers for the exact phrase turns up nothing at all before December 1941, when the Rex Cafe in LaFayette advertised Lucy's chicken fried steaks in the Walker County Messenger of the 11th, the same page that carried a letter from a local boy who had come through Pearl Harbor four days earlier. The gravy is much older than the name: the Houston Home Journal of Perry, Georgia, was already laying fried chicken in a bed of cream gravy on 4 May 1871.
Why this version works
Half an inch of oil at 350°F. Enough to float the crust off the pan bottom so it puffs, not enough to be deep frying. Below 325°F the coating drinks oil; above 375°F the outside is dark before the middle of a quarter-inch steak is hot.
Two passes through the flour, with a rest. Flour, then egg and buttermilk, then flour again, pressed hard so the dredge takes on a shaggy texture. Ten minutes on a rack after that lets the surface hydrate into a paste that holds; skip the rest and the crust leaves the meat in the oil.
The gravy is made of what the steak left behind. Three tablespoons of the frying fat, the browned scraps of dredge, three tablespoons of the seasoned flour and two cups of milk. The seasoning is already in the flour, which is why this gravy tastes of the steak and a roux made separately never does.
Cube steak is a defined thing, not a mystery cut. The USDA's Institutional Meat Purchase Specifications list it as item 1100: beef from any part of the carcass except shank and heel meat, run through the cuber twice at approximate right angles, with knitting of two or more pieces and folding permitted. Item 1101, the special, is the same thing restricted to round, loin, rib or chuck with no knitting or folding allowed. If your butcher can tell you which one you are buying, buy the 1101.