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Beef Steak with Oyster Sauce

A steak served with a sauce made from oyster liquor, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beef Steak with Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Cook the steak as desired.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the oyster liquor with the butter and a small amount of flour.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add the oysters and let it boil for a moment.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the steak and serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Oyster + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,582 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a rich, smooth body and mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the oyster liquor into a sauce that clings to the steak.
Oysters
Add briny, savory flavor and tender texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce after adding the oysters. Oysters overcook quickly and turn rubbery when boiled too long. The record asks only for a brief boil, so the oysters should be added at the end and cooked just until heated through.

“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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