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To Fry Beef Steaks

A dish of browned rump steaks served with a shallot and flour-based sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,081 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Fry Beef Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the steaks

  1. Season the rump steaks with salt and pepper.

  2. Fry the steaks in a little butter over high heat until browned.

  3. Remove the steaks and place them in a dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour out the fat from the frying pan.

  2. Add ½ pint of hot gravy or hot water to the pan.

  3. Mix in a little butter rolled in flour, salt, pepper, and chopped shallots.

  4. Boil the mixture in the pan for 2 minutes.

  5. Pour the sauce over the steaks and serve.

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. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + shallottop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Rump steaks
The main protein, browned in butter to develop a savoury crust.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the steaks.
Flour
Rolled into the butter, it thickens the pan liquid into a sauce.
Hot gravy or hot water
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, deglazing the pan and carrying flavour.
Shallots
Add a mild, aromatic onion flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the steaks over high heat. High heat in a little butter browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, building the savoury flavour the sauce is made from. Pale, steamed steaks lack that depth.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Okrafits about as well

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