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Steaks

Steaks cooked in butter, coated with flour, simmered in water and catsup or pickle, optionally with onion and wine, then garnished.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the steaks

  1. Cut the steaks thinner than for broiling.

  2. Heat butter or clarified dripping in an iron frying pan until hot.

  3. Add the steaks and turn them until cooked to your liking.

  4. Remove the steaks from the pan, keeping 1 tablespoon of fat.

Make the catsup sauce

  1. Stir in flour to make a paste and cook until slightly brown.

  2. Add boiling water to reach the thickness of good cream.

  3. Stir in catsup or pickle and boil for a few minutes.

  4. Strain the sauce over the steaks.

  5. Optional: Add sliced onion or minced shallot and port wine to the sauce.

  6. Garnish with horseradish or pickles.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Horseradish + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together259 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Steaks
The main protein, cooked in hot fat until done to the cook's preference.
Flour
Stirred into the hot fat to form a paste that thickens the sauce.
Catsup
Adds savory, tangy flavour to the sauce.
Butter or dripping
Fat for searing the steaks and the base for the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour paste. Cooking the flour in the fat until slightly brown develops a nutty flavour and removes raw starch taste. Adding boiling water to an undercooked paste can leave the sauce pasty and floury.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, mushroom, horseradish, walnut):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, horseradish, walnut. 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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