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Porterhouse Steak

A thick porterhouse steak grilled and served with butter, onions, tomatoes, and horseradish sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Porterhouse Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Brush both sides of the steak with warm butter or salad oil.

  2. Sprinkle with pepper and let it rest for about 1 hour before cooking.

Cook and serve

  1. Grill the steak over a clear fire until cooked to your liking.

  2. Serve with Maitre d'Hotel butter, fried button onions, small stuffed tomatoes, and horseradish sauce.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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

Porterhouse steak
Provides the main protein; its thickness allows a browned exterior with a tender interior.
Butter or salad oil
Adds moisture and fat to the surface, helping the steak brown evenly on the grill.

The step that matters

Grilling to your liking. Heat browns the outside through the Maillard reaction while the centre cooks more slowly. Because the steak is about 2 inches thick, removing it at the right moment matters, since the interior keeps cooking after it leaves the fire.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, onion, tomato, sauce. 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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