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Beefsteak and Mushrooms

Beefsteak topped with a mushroom sauce made from sautéed mushrooms, milk, butter, and browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Beefsteak and Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the mushrooms in milk for 8 minutes.

  2. Season the mushrooms.

  3. Add the butter.

  4. Thicken the mixture with browned flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil the beefsteak to your desired doneness.

  2. Place the beefsteak on a platter.

  3. Pour the mushroom sauce over it.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Mushrooms
Provide the main flavor and savory body of the sauce.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Browned flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch absorbs liquid, and adds a toasty aroma.
Beefsteak
Serves as the main protein, browning on the surface under the broiler.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with browned flour. Flour starch thickens only when it is evenly dispersed in the hot liquid and given time to swell. Adding it unevenly or stirring poorly causes lumps and a thin or pasty sauce.

“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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