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A Beef Steak Dressed Hastily in a Stewpan

A quick beef steak cooked in butter with onion, walnut ketchup, shallot, pepper, salt, and water, thickened with flour and butter, garnished with horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 440 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

A Beef Steak Dressed Hastily in a Stewpan

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the steaks in butter until browned.

  2. Add water, onion, walnut ketchup, shallot, white pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover and stew gently until cooked through.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour and butter.

  5. Garnish with scraped horseradish and serve hot.

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. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

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

Beef steaks
Provide the main protein, which browns in butter and becomes tender when stewed.
Butter
Browns the steaks and adds richness to the gravy.
Walnut ketchup
Adds a dark, savoury, tangy flavour to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the steaks.

The step that matters

Stew gently until cooked through. A gentle simmer keeps the meat tender and the liquid from boiling away or toughening the protein. Too high a heat can make the steak firm and dry, so keep the pan covered on low heat.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, onion, walnut, ketchup, shallot, flour):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, onion, walnut, ketchup, shallot, 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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