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Spanish Steak

A steak dish simmered in a chile‑infused gravy with garlic, thyme, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Spanish Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chiles

  1. Seed the chiles and cover them with boiling water.

  2. Soak until tender, then scrape the pulp into the water.

Brown the steak

  1. Cut the steak into small pieces and fry until browned in hot dripping or butter.

  2. Add the flour and brown it.

Simmer

  1. Cover the meat with the chile water and add garlic and thyme.

  2. Simmer until the meat is tender and the gravy reaches the right consistency.

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. Garlic + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,608 recipes

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

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + thymetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Round steak
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender through slow simmering.
Red chiles
Provide heat and flavour to the chile water that becomes the sauce.
Flour
Browned in the fat to thicken the gravy as it simmers.
Dripping or butter
Fat for browning the steak and flour, adding richness and flavour.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot fat until it turns colour, otherwise the gravy tastes raw and floury and thickens unevenly.

Swap the garlic

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, flour, thyme, 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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