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Beefsteak Gravy

A butter-based gravy made with steak juice, salt, pepper, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beefsteak Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a bowl set over a kettle of hot water.

  2. If the butter is very salty, add very little salt.

  3. Dust in the black pepper and add the hot water.

  4. Save all the juice from the cooked steak to add to the gravy without pressing the beef.

  5. Ensure the mixture does not boil to prevent it from becoming oily.

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 + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the gravy.
Juice from sirloin steak
Adds meaty flavour and savouriness to the gravy.

The step that matters

Keep the mixture from boiling. Boiling a butter-based mixture can split the emulsion, releasing fat and leaving the gravy oily instead of smooth.

“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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