Name: Broiled Steak
Ingredients: 1 thick round steak; melted butter or olive oil; salt; pepper

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Broiled Steak

Ingredients

1 thick round steak
melted butter or olive oil
salt
pepper

Directions

Prepare

Grease the steak with melted butter or olive oil.
Season the steak with salt and pepper.

Broil and serve

Place the steak in a wire broiler.
Hold the broiler over a hot blaze or coals.
Serve the steak very hot.

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.

Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Round steak: Provides the main protein; its lean structure becomes tender and browned when broiled over high heat.
Melted butter or olive oil: Adds a thin coating of fat that helps the surface brown and keeps the meat from drying.

“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.