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Beefsteak Pie

Grilled steak served with fried potatoes and pats of butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Beefsteak Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel the potatoes.

  2. Slice the potatoes.

  3. Fry the potato slices in a cloth until thoroughly cooked.

Fry the potatoes

  1. Heat a deep pan of fat.

  2. Place the potatoes in a frying basket.

  3. Lower the basket into the hot fat and cook until tender.

  4. Remove the basket and let the potatoes rest on a plate until the fat boils again.

  5. Return the basket to the pan and fry for 2 to 3 minutes until crisp.

Grill and serve

  1. Grill the steak over a clear fire for 7 to 10 minutes, depending on thickness.

  2. Shape the maître d'hôtel butter into rounds using a small cutter.

  3. Serve the steak on a hot dish, garnished with the crispy potatoes and pats of butter on top.

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. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Main protein; grilling browns its surface and sets its texture.
Potatoes
Starch that cooks until tender inside and crisps in hot fat outside.
Fat for frying
Hot fat conducts heat that cooks and crisps the potato slices.
Maître d'hôtel butter
Melting butter adds richness and carries its herb flavour over the hot steak.

The step that matters

Frying the potatoes twice. The first fry cooks the potato through to tenderness. Resting lets the fat return to the boil, and the second fry drives off surface moisture so the potatoes turn crisp rather than greasy.

“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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