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Beef Steaks and Ovster Sauce

Beef steaks served with a sauce made from oyster liquor, mace, melon peel, cream, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Beef Steaks and Ovster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strain the liquor from the oysters and soak them in cold water to remove grit.

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer the oyster liquor with mace and melon peel.

  2. Add the oysters to the simmering liquor and stew for a few minutes.

  3. If using, stir in the cream.

  4. Mix in the butter and flour until smooth. Let the sauce boil briefly.

Cook and serve

  1. Season and broil the beef steaks until cooked to your liking.

  2. Serve the broiled steaks topped with the oyster 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Oyster + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 and smooth richness.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, cohesive sauce when mixed with butter.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, creamier texture to the sauce.
Oyster liquor
Provides the briny, savoury base flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix in the butter and flour until smooth. Flour clumps if added straight to hot liquid. Blending it with butter first, then whisking it in, lets starch disperse evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of becoming lumpy.

Swap the melon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, mace, cream, butter, flour, beef):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Melonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, mace, cream, butter, flour, beef. 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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