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Beef Steak, Long Branch Style

A steak cooked with salad oil, butter, onion, parsley, lemon juice, pepper, and sea salt, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Beef Steak, Long Branch Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Cut the steak into nice pieces or leave it whole.

  2. Dip the steak in salad oil and set aside for a few hours.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped onion and parsley, and sauté for a few minutes.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice, pepper, and salt, and cook for 5 minutes.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil the steak over a clear fire until cooked to your liking.

  2. Serve the steak hot with the 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Walnut + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the main protein; cooking it over high heat browns the surface and firms the meat.
Butter
Melts to form the base of the sauce, adding richness and carrying the flavor of the onion and parsley.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it sauté, adding savory depth to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Broil until cooked to your liking. Steak continues to cook briefly after leaving the heat, and high direct heat can quickly overcook thin pieces while leaving thick ones underdone. Checking doneness as you go helps keep the centre at the level you want.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, butter, parsley, lemon, pepper. 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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