Skip to main content
Main

A Beef Steak Dressed Hastily in a Stexvpan

A beef steak cooked in a walnut catsup and onion gravy, finished with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

A Beef Steak Dressed Hastily in a Stexvpan

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the steaks

  1. Fry the steaks in butter until browned.

  2. Add water, onion, walnut catsup, shallot, white pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover and stew gently until cooked through.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with flour and butter.

  2. Garnish with scraped horseradish and serve hot.

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. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steaks
Provide the main protein, which browns on the outside and becomes tender when stewed.
Walnut catsup
Adds a dark, savoury, slightly tangy flavour to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the steaks instead of staying thin.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aroma as it softens into the liquid.

The step that matters

Stew gently until cooked through. A gentle simmer keeps the meat tender and the liquid from boiling away or toughening the proteins. Vigorous boiling makes the meat tough and can scorch the gravy on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, onion, walnut, shallot, flour, horseradish):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, onion, walnut, shallot, flour, 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes