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Steak with Vegetables

A thick steak cooked with flour, butter, boiling water, turnips, and carrots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Steak with Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Dredge the steak with flour.

  2. Fry the steak in butter until golden brown.

Stew and serve

  1. Place the steak in a stew pan.

  2. Pour the boiling water from the frying pan into the stew pan.

  3. Add sliced turnips and carrots to the steak.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + carrottop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,083 recipes

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

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

Flour
Coats the steak so it browns well and helps thicken the pan liquid.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the steak's surface and adds rich flavour.
Turnips
Vegetable that adds body and mild sweetness as it cooks in the liquid.
Carrots
Vegetable that adds sweetness and soft texture as it cooks in the liquid.

The step that matters

Frying the floured steak until golden brown. Flour and butter brown through the Maillard reaction, which builds flavour on the surface. Too little heat steams the steak instead, leaving it pale and bland, and the flour can turn gummy rather than crisp.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, turnip):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, turnip. 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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