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Beef Steak, Porterhouse

A grilled porterhouse steak rubbed with garlic and served with horseradish and fried mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Steak, Porterhouse

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut a porterhouse steak from the sirloin, leaving the undercut on and cutting from the chine bone portion.

  2. Rub the steak all over with a cut shallot or clove of garlic.

Cook and serve

  1. Grill the steak over a clear fire, turning it every minute until cooked.

  2. Place the cooked steak on a very hot dish and garnish with horseradish and fried mushrooms.

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. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  3. Horseradish + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together269 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Porterhouse steak
Provides the main body of the dish, with its meat and fat setting its richness and texture when grilled.
Shallot or garlic
Rubbed over the steak to add a light aromatic flavour to the surface of the meat.

The step that matters

Grilling the steak over a clear fire. Turning it every minute keeps heat moving through a steak about an inch thick, so the outside browns without the inside overcooking. A clear, hot fire without smoke or flare-ups also helps prevent scorching and bitter charred flavour.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Welsh onionfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, 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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