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Breakfast

Breakfast Dish of Cold Steak

A toast topped with a gravy of butter, flour, and cold steak or boiled meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Breakfast Dish of Cold Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Heat a skillet over medium heat and add the butter.

  2. Once the butter is hot, add the chopped cold steak or boiled meat.

  3. Sprinkle the flour over the meat and stir well.

  4. Pour in enough water to create a gravy consistency.

  5. Season with pepper and salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve the mixture over toast.

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. Butter + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

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

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

Cold steak or boiled meat
Provides the main protein and bulk of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a gravy as it cooks with the liquid.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the pan and carries flavor into the gravy.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the meat. Flour must be spread evenly and stirred well into the fat before liquid is added. Otherwise it clumps and the gravy turns lumpy instead of smooth.

“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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