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Broiled Porterhouse-steaks

A broiled porterhouse steak served with fried potatoes and watercress garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Broiled Porterhouse-steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the steaks, leaving about 3 inches of the thin flank attached.

  2. Chop or saw off part of the back bone for a neat appearance.

  3. Notch the edges of the steaks to prevent curling during cooking.

Broil and serve

  1. Brush the steaks with warmed butter.

  2. Place them on a hot grill over a clear fire and broil for about 10 minutes or until cooked to your liking.

  3. Transfer to a dish, garnish with fried potatoes, 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. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + fried potatotop 40% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Fried potato + watercresstop 63% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Porterhouse steaks
Provide the main protein, whose thickness and marbling keep the meat juicy during broiling.
Maitre-d'hotel butter
Adds richness and moisture, and its fat carries savory flavor over the seared surface.

The step that matters

Notch the edges of the steaks. Notching the fatty edge relieves the tension that forms as the fat renders and connective tissue tightens under heat, which otherwise makes the steak curl and cook unevenly.

“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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