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Stuffed Beef Steak

A beef steak stuffed with mace, cloves, thyme, pepper, salt, and bread crumbs, baked in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stuffed Beef Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Beat the steak well.

  2. Mix mace, cloves, thyme, pepper, salt, and bread crumbs.

  3. Spread the mixture over the steak, reserving 1 tablespoon to thicken the gravy.

  4. Roll the steak and tie it at each end and in the center.

Cook and finish

  1. Place in a pan and add enough water to prevent burning.

  2. Add butter to the pan.

  3. Cook in the oven, basting frequently.

  4. When done, thicken the gravy with the reserved bread crumbs and adjust seasoning.

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. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb juices from the steak and thicken the gravy as a stuffing binder.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the surface brown and the gravy taste rounded.
Beef steak
Provides the main protein that is rolled around the stuffing and cooked through.

The step that matters

Adding water to the pan. Enough water must be in the pan to prevent the drippings and bread crumbs from scorching before the steak cooks through, and it forms the base for the gravy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, thyme, pepper, bread, beef, butter):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, thyme, pepper, bread, beef, butter. 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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