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Curried Steak

A steak cooked with onion, butter, stock, curry powder, lemon, vinegar, and served with boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Curried Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Grill the steak until nearly done.

  2. Remove the steak from heat and cut into good-sized pieces.

Make the curry

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter and fry the finely sliced onion until cooked.

  2. Add the meat to the pan and fry lightly for a few minutes.

  3. Stir in the stock and a good squeeze of lemon juice.

  4. Thicken the mixture with the flour and add the curry powder.

  5. Simmer for twenty minutes.

  6. Just before serving, stir in the vinegar.

Serve

  1. Serve with a border of carefully boiled rice, rinsed with cold water to separate the grains.

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 + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour 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

Steak
Provides the main protein, which is cooked first and then gently finished in the sauce.
Butter
Fat for frying the onion, carrying the curry flavour and adding richness.
Onion
Softens as it cooks, adding sweetness and body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock and curry mixture into a smooth sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and flavour that define the dish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with the flour. Flour must be cooked into the liquid, or it stays lumpy and tastes raw. Stirring it in smoothly before adding more liquid prevents clumps, and the simmer that follows lets the starch swell fully and the sauce thicken evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, flour, vinegar, rice):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, flour, vinegar, rice. 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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