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Steak with Onions

A steak cooked with onions and a gravy made from butter, flour, and milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Steak with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Sear the steak

  1. Heat a frying pan until very hot and grease it with hot lard.

  2. Add the steak and crisp it quickly on both sides.

  3. Remove the steak to a dish and keep warm.

Make the onion gravy

  1. In the same pan, add the chopped onions and scald them with boiling water.

  2. Season the onions with salt and pepper.

  3. Fry the onions until light brown.

  4. Add the butter and dredge the onions with flour.

  5. Pour in enough milk or cream to create a nice gravy.

  6. Bring the gravy to a boil.

  7. Pour the gravy over the steak.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Porterhouse steak
Provides the main meat, seared quickly to brown the outside while staying tender inside.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet as they fry, adding flavor to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices and butter into a gravy that coats the steak.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and richness, forming the body of the gravy.

The step that matters

Crisp the steak in very hot fat. A very hot pan with hot lard browns the surface quickly, building flavor through browning before the inside overcooks. A cool pan would steam the meat and leave it grey.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, flour, milk. 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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