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Pan Broiled Steak

A steak pan-broiled with suet, salt, pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pan Broiled Steak

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and sear

  1. Wipe the steak on all sides with a cloth wrung out of cold water.

  2. Heat a cast iron frying pan until almost red hot, rub a piece of suet over the pan, and add the meat.

  3. Cook the steak on one side for 10 seconds, then turn it over and cook the other side for 10 seconds.

Finish and serve

  1. Reduce the temperature and cook slowly until the meat is pink inside, turning occasionally.

  2. Test by cutting into the meat next to the bone.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and butter, and serve on a hot platter immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Steak
Forms the main body of the dish, and its interior is cooked to pink by gentle heat.
Suet
Rubbed on the hot pan, its fat keeps the steak from sticking and adds richness to the surface.
Butter
Added at the end, it adds richness and a smooth, savory finish to the cooked meat.

The step that matters

Dropping the heat after the initial sear. The first seconds of searing at very high heat brown the surface and seal in juices. If the heat stays high, the outside over-browns or burns before the centre reaches pink, so lowering the temperature lets the interior cook evenly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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