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Steak a LA Stanley

A steak served with baked bananas, parsley butter, and horseradish sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Steak a LA Stanley

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the steak

  1. Select a 1½ inch thick steak and broil it to your liking.

  2. Season the steak.

  3. Place the steak on a hot platter.

Bake the bananas

  1. Peel and halve the bananas lengthwise.

  2. Place the bananas in a dripping pan.

  3. Bake the bananas until they are a delicate brown, basting frequently with butter and lemon juice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix the remaining butter and lemon juice with the chopped parsley.

  2. Place the baked bananas on the steak and spread the parsley mixture over them.

  3. Serve with horseradish sauce.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Horseradish + saucetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together775 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Forms the main body of the dish and develops savoury browned flavour under the broiler.
Bananas
Soften and caramelise when baked, adding natural sweetness and a tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the bananas brown evenly while keeping them moist.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet bananas and balances the rich butter.

The step that matters

Bake the bananas until delicately browned, basting often. Bananas brown quickly and can turn mushy or burnt. Frequent basting with butter and lemon juice keeps the surface moist and encourages even, gentle browning.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Bananathe original

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