Skip to main content
Main

Hamburger Steak

A minced steak patty seasoned with onion, salt, pepper, and cooked in lard and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Hamburger Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the patties

  1. In a bowl, combine the minced steak and minced onion.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, then shape into flat cakes the size of a biscuit.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat the lard and butter in a frying pan until boiling hot.

  2. Add the steak cakes and fry until nicely browned on both sides.

  3. Garnish with parsley around the edge of the platter and place lemon slices on top.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Round steak
Forms the main body of the cakes and supplies the meaty flavor and structure.
Onion
Adds moisture and a mild sweetness that softens during cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and helps the cakes brown in the pan.
Lard
Gives the pan a high-heat frying fat that promotes browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Fry in a very hot pan. The fat must be boiling hot before the cakes go in, so the surface sears and browns quickly. A cool pan lets the juices seep out and the patties steam and turn grey instead of browning.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, parsley, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, parsley, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes