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Coddled Steak

A dish of steak steamed with salt and bread crumbs, optionally seasoned with onion or sage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and sage are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,628 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Coddled Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Layer the pan

  1. Cover the bottom of a pan with a thin layer of steak.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and cover with bread crumbs.

  3. Add alternate layers of steak and bread crumbs, salting each layer of meat.

  4. If desired, add minced onion or powdered sage for seasoning.

Steam

  1. Place in a steam cooker and steam until tender, about 45 minutes to 2 hours depending on the amount and quality of meat.

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. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Bread + sagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Round or cheaper cuts of steak
Tougher cuts become tender during long, moist steaming, which breaks down connective tissue.
Bread crumbs
Absorb meat juices and help keep the layers moist and loosely held together.

The step that matters

Steam until tender, not just for a fixed time. Tougher cuts need long, moist heat to break down connective tissue, so cooking time depends on the cut and amount of meat. Checking tenderness prevents underdone or stringy meat.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sage):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sage. 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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