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Broiled Steak

A thick steak cooked on a grill, seasoned with butter and coarse sea salt, garnished with parsley, optionally served with mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Broiled Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the steak

  1. Preheat your grill to high heat.

  2. Broil the steak for a few minutes on each side until it is rich brown on the outside and pink inside.

  3. Spread butter on both sides of the steak and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Garnish the platter with parsley.

  2. Optionally, mix 1 teaspoon of chopped parsley into a heaping teaspoon of butter and spread it on the steak.

  3. If using, cream the mushrooms and serve them over the steak or in a small dish.

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

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

  2. Parsley + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 recipes

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

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the main protein; browning on the outside builds flavour while the inside stays pink.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the surface and carries flavour across the steak.

The step that matters

Broil until rich brown outside and pink inside. Searing at high heat browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, which adds flavour. Cooking too long on each side dries the meat and turns the interior grey, so timing per side matters.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mushroom. 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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