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Hamburger Steak

A fried steak patty made from minced flank or round steak mixed with onion, seasoned, and garnished with celery and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hamburger Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Finely chop the steak until it is a perfect mince.

  2. Finely chop the onion and mix it with the minced meat.

  3. Season the mixture with salt and pepper.

  4. Form the mixture into flat cakes, about the size of a biscuit, or one large flat cake less than ½ inch thick.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a frying pan with a mix of butter and lard until boiling hot.

  2. Fry the steak cakes until browned.

  3. Garnish with celery tops around the edge of the platter and place lemon slices on top.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Flank or round steak
Provides the meat that forms the body and beefy flavour of the cakes.
Onion
Adds moisture and savoury aroma as it mixes into the minced meat.
Butter
Adds fat for frying, contributing flavour and helping the cakes brown.
Lard
Provides frying fat that tolerates high heat and promotes browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Fry the steak cakes until browned. Frying in very hot fat sears the surface quickly, creating browning and flavour while keeping the inside juicy. Cakes fried in fat that is not hot enough absorb grease and steam instead of browning.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, celery, lemon):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, celery, lemon. 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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