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Beefsteak a LA Frying Pan

A steak cooked in a frying pan with a simple gravy made from water, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

Beefsteak a LA Frying Pan

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the steak

  1. Heat a frying pan until hot.

  2. Grease the pan with a little fat from the steak to prevent sticking.

  3. Place the steak in the pan; it will adhere but will loosen after a second.

  4. Cover the pan and turn the steak often while cooking.

  5. Season the steak with coarse sea salt.

Make the gravy

  1. For gravy, add ½ cup of water to the pan.

  2. Make a smooth thickening with ½ teaspoon of flour, add it to the water, and boil for one minute.

  3. Stir in 1 tablespoon of butter and pour the gravy over the steak before serving.

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

Steak
Browns on the hot pan surface, building crust and meaty flavour while the inside cooks.
Flour
Starch thickens the pan liquid into gravy as it heats and boils.
Butter
Adds richness, gloss and a smoother mouthfeel to the finished gravy.
Fat from the steak
Lightly coats the hot pan so the steak releases more easily.

The step that matters

Making the smooth thickening. Flour added dry or unmixed forms lumps that are hard to smooth out. Mixing it smoothly first lets the starch disperse evenly. Boiling for a minute gelatinises the starch to thicken the gravy and cooks off the raw flour taste.

“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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