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Fried Beef Steak

A dish of fried beef steak served with cream gravy, boiled potatoes, and farina custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,052 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Fried Beef Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the beef steak until cooked to your liking.

  2. In a separate pan, make cream gravy by mixing flour with milk and cooking until thickened.

  3. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  4. Prepare farina custard by cooking farina with milk, sugar, and eggs until thick.

Serve

  1. Serve all dishes hot.

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. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the milk into a cream gravy as it cooks.
Eggs
Help set the farina custard so it becomes thick.
Farina
Thickens the milk into a custard as it cooks.
Potatoes
Become tender when boiled, providing the starchy side dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the farina custard.

The step that matters

Prepare farina custard by cooking farina with milk, sugar, and eggs until thick.. Farina thickens only as its starch gelatinizes in hot milk, and eggs set when heated. Cooking too briefly leaves it thin, while overheating eggs can curdle or scorch the custard. Stir steadily and watch the texture.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, milk, egg, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits about as well
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Asparagusfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, milk, egg, sugar. 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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