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Saucing and Serving Steaks

A simple ketchup-based sauce for steaks made with flour, broth, pepper, salt, and catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,078 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Saucing and Serving Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a small pan, gently brown the flour.

  2. Gradually pour in the hot broth or water while shaking the pan.

  3. Add pepper, salt, and catsup or your preferred sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the steaks before serving.

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. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + saucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Pepper and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Browned flour gives a nutty aroma and thickens the liquid once it is cooked into it.
Broth or water
Forms the liquid base that the browned flour thickens into a pourable sauce.
Catsup or preferred store sauce
Adds sweetness and acidity for a tangy, rounded flavour.

The step that matters

Gradually pouring in the hot liquid. Adding the hot liquid slowly while shaking the pan spreads the flour particles through it before their starch swells. Pouring it all at once tends to form lumps that are hard to smooth out.

“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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