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Steak Stanley

A steak served with a horseradish sauce made from flour, stock, butter, milk, salt, pepper, and grated horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Steak Stanley

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Trim off the fat and skin from the beef.

  2. Grind the meat twice using a meat chopper.

  3. Mix in salt, onion, and pepper.

  4. Form the mixture into small, even-thickness steaks.

Cook and serve

  1. Pan boil the steaks for 10 minutes.

  2. For the sauce, blend flour, stock, and butter in a saucepan. Add milk, salt, pepper, and horseradish to the mixture. Cook until thickened, then serve over the steaks.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  5. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the meat that is ground and shaped into steaks.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the stock and milk.
Beef stock
Adds savory beef flavor to the sauce base.
Milk
Makes the sauce creamy and mellows the horseradish bite.
Grated horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent flavor that defines the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce until thickened. Flour thickens only when heated long enough to swell its starch in the liquid. Stopping early leaves a thin sauce, while overheating can make it lumpy or dull the horseradish's pungency.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, pepper, flour, butter, 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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