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Mushrooms and Beefsteak

A steak served with a mushroom sauce made from canned mushrooms, butter, flour, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Mushrooms and Beefsteak

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mushroom sauce

  1. Drain the liquid from the mushrooms and place them in a frying pan with the butter.

  2. Add pepper and salt, and cook until the mushrooms are slightly browned.

  3. Move the mushrooms to one side of the pan, add the flour, and rub it smooth in the hot butter.

  4. When the flour is brown, pour in the mushroom liquid and a little water.

  5. Stir the mushrooms with the mixture and let it boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Squeeze in the lemon juice and pour the mixture over the steak.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Mushrooms
Provide the main body of the sauce and their savory, browned flavor.
Butter
Carries the frying and browns the mushrooms, adding richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the mushroom liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and mushroom sauce.

The step that matters

Rub the flour smooth in the hot butter until brown. Cooking flour in fat before adding liquid lets it thicken evenly without lumps. Stirring it smooth while it toasts prevents clumps and gives the sauce a nutty depth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, 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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