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Hamburger Steak

A pan‑fried minced steak patty seasoned with onion, salt, and pepper, served with celery and lemon garnish and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hamburger Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Chop the steak until finely minced.

  2. Mix the chopped onion with the minced meat.

  3. Season the mixture with salt and pepper.

  4. Form the mixture into flat cakes, about the size of a biscuit and less than ½ inch thick.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a frying pan with a mix of butter and lard until boiling hot.

  2. Fry the steak cakes until browned.

  3. Make a brown gravy from the frying grease and pour it over the meat.

  4. Garnish the platter with celery tops and lemon slices on top of the meat.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Flank or round steak
Provides the meat base, which is minced and formed into cakes that hold together and brown.
Onion
Adds moisture and a savoury, aromatic flavour to the minced meat.
Butter and lard
Fat for frying that browns the cakes and forms the drippings used for the gravy.

The step that matters

Fry the steak cakes until browned. The pan must be very hot before the cakes go in, so their surfaces brown quickly and seal. Searing builds flavour and keeps the cakes from steaming and falling apart in grease.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, celery, lemon):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, celery, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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