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Beef Steaks

Grilled beef steaks served with butter, shallot sauce, horseradish, and pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat your grill and grease it with beef suet.

Grill and rest

  1. Place the steaks on the grill and cook until browned on one side.

  2. Turn the steaks and cook until browned on the other side.

  3. Transfer the steaks to a hot dish, layering a slice of butter between each steak.

  4. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and black pepper, and let rest for 2-3 minutes.

  5. In the meantime, mix the sliced shallot with water.

  6. Return the steaks to the grill, turning them until cooked to your liking.

Serve

  1. Pour the shallot mixture over the steaks and serve with horseradish and pickles.

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 + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  5. Horseradish + saucetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together775 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steaks
Provide the meat that browns on the grill and becomes the main dish.
Butter
Melts over the hot steaks, adding richness and moisture to the meat.
Shallot
Adds a mild, sharp onion flavour to the pan-juice sauce.

The step that matters

Returning the steaks to the grill. Cooking the steaks in two short rounds with a rest between lets the surface brown while the inside cooks gradually. Checking doneness as you go helps avoid overcooking.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, pepper, shallot, sauce):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Horseradishthe original

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