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Breakfast Steak

A steak baked with flour, salt, pepper, parsley, and butter, served with a pan sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Breakfast Steak

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the steak

  1. If the steak is tough, pound it with a steak mallet.

  2. Lay the steak in a baking tin and dredge lightly with flour.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and chopped parsley if desired.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 20 to 30 minutes, or until cooked to your liking.

  2. Remove the steak and place it on a platter.

  3. In the baking pan, add a little flour to the meat juices and season with butter.

  4. Let the pan juices boil.

  5. Pour the sauce over the steak 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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Beef or veal steak
Provides the main protein; pounding breaks down tough fibres for a more tender bite.
Flour
Dredging coats the steak and thickens the pan juices into a sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the pan sauce, giving it a smoother flavour.

The step that matters

Letting the pan juices boil. Flour needs to be cooked in hot liquid to thicken and lose its raw taste. Boiling the juices with flour gives a smooth, stable sauce rather than a pasty or floury one.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, pepper, butter):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, pepper, butter. 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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