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Rump Steak with or Without Oyster Sauce

A steak served with a sauce made from oysters, butter, flour, milk, ketchup, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,019 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Rump Steak with or Without Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Broil the rump steak over a clear fire until tender.

  2. Prepare a dish with chopped onion, shallot, pepper, and ketchup.

  3. Rub the steak with butter when serving.

  4. Open the oysters.

  5. Strain the oyster water into a stewpan.

  6. Cut the oysters into two or three pieces.

  7. Add nutmeg and juice to the oysters.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. Heat the mixture.

  2. Add the oysters for a few minutes.

  3. Rub the walnut-sized butter into flour.

  4. Add the butter-flour mixture with milk to the oyster mixture.

  5. Heat everything properly.

Serve

  1. Serve in a boat or pour over the steak.

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. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 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

Rump steak
Main protein; broiling over direct heat browns the surface and cooks it until tender.
Oysters
Provide the briny, savoury flavour that defines the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and milk.
Milk
Forms the creamy body of the sauce together with the flour and butter.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and helps bind the flour into the sauce.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the base mixture.

The step that matters

Heat everything properly. Flour must be heated long enough in the butter and milk to cook out its raw starch and thicken the sauce. Oysters should be heated only until just cooked, since overcooking makes them tough and rubbery.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, shallot, pepper, ketchup, oyster, nutmeg, milk):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, shallot, pepper, ketchup, oyster, nutmeg, milk. 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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