Skip to main content
Main

Beefsteak a LA Frying Pan

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Cook the beefsteak in a frying pan.

Make and serve the gravy

  1. In the same pan, pour in ½ cup of hot water.

  2. Mix ½ teaspoon of flour with 1 tablespoon of butter to create a thickening.

  3. Add the thickening to the pan and bring to a boil.

  4. Pour the gravy over the steak and serve.

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

Beefsteak
The main protein, cooked first in the frying pan.
Flour
Starch that thickens the gravy as it heats in the liquid.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel in the gravy.
Hot water
Forms the liquid base of the gravy.

The step that matters

Add the thickening to the pan and bring to a boil. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid, so the gravy must reach a full boil to set. Stirring as it is added helps prevent lumps.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes