Stoker Swiss Steak

This easy version of Swiss steak is named in honor of Bram Stoker who wrote Dracula! Read about this tormented guy after the recipe.

Cubed steaks roasted in the oven with green pepper, tomatoes, and celery. One pan clean up and an all day taste. Perfect for those days of spring showers.

Ingredients:

2 lbs of cubed steak

¾ cup flour

2 tsp salt

2 tsp pepper

1 tsp seasoned salt

¼ – ½ cup vegetable oil

1 large onion thinly sliced

1 green bell pepper diced

2 stalks celery finely diced

2 cloves garlic minced

28 oz. can of stewed tomatoes

1½ cups beef broth

1 TBS ketchup

½ tsp oregano

1 tsp paprika

1 TBS Worcestershire sauce

Directions:

Pre heat oven to 350. Spray a dutch oven and set aside. Make sure it fits on the oven rack!

Do your cutting: cut the onion, bell pepper and celery. Cut the steak into strips.

On a plate mix the flour and seasonings

Dredge the steak in the flour.

Heat oil in the dutch oven and brown the strips turning to cook both sides. They don’t have to be fully cooked. They will finish in the oven. You are just going for color and flavor here.

Once all steak is browned, remove to a plate. Add a little more oil if needed. Add celery and bell pepper and cook to soften and get a little color on them. About 4 mins.

Add your garlic and cook for another minute.

Then add your stewed tomatoes with their liquid, ketchup, paprika, oregano and beef broth and mix well. Return the strips to the pot.

Bake in oven @ 350° for 1½ - 2 hours. Stirring gently after 45 minutes and taste for seasoning to see if you need to adjust.

Serve over buttered noodles. This goes really nice with a zapped mixed vegetable, but I suggest to pick one with no sauce.

What a meal.

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…..I cook!

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Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 on the north side of Dublin, Ireland. He is best known as the author of Dracula. This tragic gay man was also successful theater critic, theater manager, historian and speaker. Stoker would go on to publish 17 novels in all, but it was his 1897 novel that eventually earned him literary fame and became known as a masterpiece of Victorian-era Gothic literature.

He was bedridden with an unknown illness until he started school at the age of seven, when he made a complete recovery. He was educated in a private school.

He grew up without further serious illnesses, even excelling as an athlete at Trinity College, Dublin. He graduated and pursued his MA in 1875. He was auditor of the College Historical Society and president of the University Philosophical Society.

Stoker became interested in the theater as a student. He became the theater critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. In December 1876, he gave a favorable review of Henry Irving's Hamlet at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. Irving invited Stoker for dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel where he was staying, and they became “friends”.

After moving to London, Stoker became acting manager and then business manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre, London, a post he held for 27 years.

                        

The first copies of his greatest novel Dracula, appear in London bookshops on May 26, 1897.

Upon its release, Dracula enjoyed moderate success, though when Stoker died in 1912 none of his obituaries even mentioned Dracula by name.

Dracula is written as a collection of realistic but completely fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of realism to the story.

The stature of the novel grew steadily after publication. Stoker’s other attempts at literary success were less successful. Sales began to take off in the 1920s, when the novel was adapted for Broadway.

The first film adaptation of Dracula was Nosferatu, released in 1922. Stoker's widow Florence sued the filmmakers. Her chief legal complaint was that she had neither been asked for permission for the adaptation nor paid any royalty. Mrs. Stoker demanded the destruction of the negative and all prints of the film. The suit was finally resolved in the widow's favor in 1925. A single print of the film survived, however, and it has become well known.

Dracula mania kicked into even higher gear with Universal’s blockbuster 1931 film, starring the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi. Dozens of vampire-themed movies, television shows and literature followed, though Lugosi, with his exotic accent, remains the quintessential Count Dracula. 

 

It is important to remember at that time the portrayal was considered to be overtly sexual.

Stoker was a deeply private man, but his almost sexless marriage, intense adoration of Walt Whitman, Henry Irving and Hall Caine, and shared interests with Oscar Wilde, as well as the homoerotic aspects of Dracula have led to the conclusion that he was gay.

Stoker was understandably “circumspect” following the trial of his friend Oscar Wilde.

He was a member of Wilde’s literary group. Stoker’s wife, Florence was more of his literary executrix than a wife. She had been seriously courted by Oscar Wilde for marriage first.

The missing parts within Stoker’s surviving letters and diaries are maddeningly wide. Most families of this era had a desire to destroy unseemly evidence (his wife outlived him by a quarter of a century), as well as Stoker’s own reluctance to expose what was considered criminal vice at the time.

Still, there is evidence in Stoker’s lifelong association with Hall Caine, one of the 19th Century’s most famous British authors. It was either a love affair or close to it.

More proof of his sexuality, can be found in his gushing letters to Walt Whitman:

I would like to call YOU Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk. I think that at first a man would be ashamed, for a man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become second nature to him; but I know I would not long be ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, and so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age no man becomes worthy of the name without effort. You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still-but I have not wings.

Like Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker died of syphilis. Most of his personal life had been repeatedly wiped clean by embarrassed family, personal fear, and public ignorance.

He lived in a time when society and he himself believed that sexual energy must in fact be evil. Count Dracula and his “creatures of the night” lured victims by their powerful sexuality. Stoker must have fought his own natural sexual energies and knew they were killing him.

Like Jack the Ripper stalked the prostitutes of Whitechapel, gay Victorians were hunted by more than the fear of discovery and rejection.

After suffering a number of strokes, Stoker died in London in 1912 to tertiary syphilis.

He was cremated, and his ashes were placed in a display urn in north London. The ashes of Irving Noel Stoker, the author's son, were added to his father's urn following his death in 1961.