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Beef Steaks

Stewed and fried beef rump steaks served with a sauce of wine, water, herbs, and spices, garnished with pickles and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Beef Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the steaks

  1. Season the rump steaks with pepper and salt, then place them in a stew-pan.

  2. Add ½ pint of water, mace, cloves, anchovy, sweet herbs, butter, white wine, and onion to the stew-pan.

  3. Stew the steaks until they are tender.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Remove the steaks, dust them with flour, and fry them in butter.

  2. Strain the stewing liquid and add it to the pan with the steaks.

  3. Toss everything together until hot and thick.

Serve

  1. Serve the steaks with the sauce poured over them, garnished with pickles and horseradish.

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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Clove + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rump steaks
Are the main meat, becoming tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Flour
Dusts the steaks and, with the rolled butter, thickens the sauce as it heats.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the stewing liquid, balancing the rich beef.
Anchovy
Melts into the stewing liquid, adding savoury depth without a fishy taste.
Onion
Flavours the stewing liquid with sweetness and aroma as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Stew the steaks until they are tender. Beef becomes tender only when collagen breaks down slowly in moist heat. Stewing too hard or too briefly leaves the meat tough, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer and test with a fork until it gives easily.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, anchovy, butter, flour, white wine, onion, horseradish):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, anchovy, butter, flour, white wine, onion, horseradish. 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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