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Bee? Steaks

Beef steaks cooked in butter and served with a gravy of hot gravy, pepper, salt, shallots, ketchup, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bee? Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the steaks

  1. Fry the steaks over a brisk fire with a little butter in the pan until they are light brown.

  2. Remove the steaks and place them in a dish before the fire with a little butter.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In the same pan, add the hot gravy, pepper, salt, chopped shallots, and ketchup.

  2. Boil the mixture in the pan for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Pour the gravy mixture over the steaks and garnish with scraped horseradish.

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. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Ketchup + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together223 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  5. Shallot + ketchuptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together476 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Steaks
The main protein, which browns on the outside while cooking over high heat.
Butter
Adds fat to the pan for frying and helps the steaks take on colour and flavour.
Shallots
Add a mild sweetness and aromatic flavour to the sauce as they cook down.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity to the sauce, deepening its tangy flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the steaks until light brown. Searing over a brisk fire browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, building flavour. Too little heat leaves the steaks grey and steamed rather than browned.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, shallot, ketchup):

  1. Chivefits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, shallot, ketchup. 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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