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Beef-steaks and Oyster-sauce

A dish of beef steaks served with a sauce made from oyster liquor, oysters, mace, lemon peel, cream, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beef-steaks and Oyster-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the oyster sauce

  1. Strain the liquor from the oysters and rinse them in cold water to remove grit.

  2. Simmer the liquor with mace and lemon peel.

  3. Add the oysters and stew for a few minutes.

  4. Stir in cream and butter mixed with flour, then let it boil once.

Cook and serve

  1. Season and broil the rump steaks.

  2. Serve the oyster sauce over the steaks immediately.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

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

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Oysters
Provide the main flavour of the sauce and tender bite when stewed briefly.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and liquid, giving it body.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, smoother texture to the sauce.
Rump steaks
Serve as the meat base that the oyster sauce is spooned over.

The step that matters

Boiling the flour and butter into the sauce. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid, so the mixture should be stirred in smoothly and brought to a boil once. Boiling longer or too hard can make the sauce thick, grainy or split when cream is present.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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