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To Dress a Beef Steak Oil the Moors

A beef steak seasoned with pepper and salt, cooked with butter, optionally served with oysters and catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and oyster are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,184 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

To Dress a Beef Steak Oil the Moors

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Season the beef steak with white pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Place the steak and butter in a tightly fitted tin or sheet iron vessel called a "Conjurer."

Cook and serve

  1. Use dry heat or waste paper as fuel to cook the steak quickly.

  2. Add a few oysters and some catsup for added flavor.

  3. Serve once the steak is cooked to your liking.

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. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  2. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Beef + oystertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together798 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. White pepper + buttertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Beef + white peppertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together616 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steak
Is the main protein cooked quickly over direct heat.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor across the steak's surface as it cooks.

Swap the white pepper

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, oyster. 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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