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Beefsteak Broiled

A ½‑inch thick steak seasoned with salt, pepper, and butter, broiled over coals and finished in a stewpan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter 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 Broiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the steak well with a meat mallet.

  2. Heat a griddle over fresh coals.

Sear and finish

  1. Place the steak on the griddle and sear it on both sides.

  2. Transfer the seared steak to a stewpan.

  3. Season the steak with salt, pepper, and butter.

  4. Cover the stewpan and let it cook off the heat for 4 to 5 minutes.

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 + buttertop 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

Steak
Provides the main protein; searing on both sides builds browned flavor on the surface.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor across the surface of the cooked steak.

The step that matters

Sear the steak on both sides. A hot griddle browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, creating savory flavor. If the heat is too low, the steak steams and turns grey instead of developing a crust.

“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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