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To Dress Beef-Steaks the Common Way

Beef steaks cooked in butter, water, onion, walnut ketchup, caper liquor, pepper, salt, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Dress Beef-Steaks the Common Way

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the steaks in butter until browned.

  2. Add water, sliced onion, walnut ketchup, caper liquor, pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover and let them stew gently.

  4. Once cooked, thicken the gravy with flour and butter.

  5. Serve the steaks with the gravy.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Beef steaks
Provide the main protein, which browns on the outside and becomes tender when stewed.
Butter
Browns the steaks during frying and enriches the gravy with fat and flavour.
Onion
Softens during stewing and adds sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth gravy as it binds with fat and water.
Walnut ketchup
Adds a dark, savoury, tangy flavour to the gravy.

The step that matters

Fry the steaks in butter until browned. Browning creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale steaks give a flatter gravy, so colour them well before adding liquid.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, onion, ketchup, pepper, flour):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Sesamefits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, onion, ketchup, pepper, flour. 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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