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Beefsteak with Mushrooms

A steak topped with sautéed mushrooms, butter, wine, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and optional onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Beefsteak with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mushrooms

  1. Melt butter in a frying pan.

  2. For added flavor, sauté a small amount of onion in the butter before adding mushrooms.

  3. Add peeled mushrooms and cook until heated through.

  4. Season with wine, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

Serve

  1. Pour the mushroom mixture over broiled porter-house steaks on a platter.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Mushroom + winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,632 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

  4. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Porter-house steaks
Main protein, served with the mushrooms as the centrepiece of the dish.
Mushrooms
Provide the main body of the topping and release moisture that mingles with the butter.
Butter
Carries fat for cooking and adds rich flavour to the mushrooms.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma, deglazing the pan and deepening the mushroom flavour.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma when softened in the butter before the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Cooking the mushrooms until heated through. Mushrooms hold a lot of water. If the pan is crowded or too cool, they steam in their own liquid instead of browning, leaving the topping watery and bland.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, butter, wine, pepper, onion):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, wine, pepper, onion. 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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