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Broiled Beefsteak

A steak grilled over coals, seasoned with salt and pepper, topped with butter, then finished in a hot dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Broiled Beefsteak

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the steak

  1. Preheat a griddle over a hot bed of coals.

  2. Place the steak on the griddle and turn it frequently until cooked to your desired doneness.

  3. Transfer the steak to a very hot dish.

Season and finish

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Top with large bits of butter.

  3. Cover and place in the stove for a few minutes until the butter melts.

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 + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tenderloin steak
The main cut; heat firms and browns its surface while the inside cooks to the chosen doneness.
Butter
Melts over the hot steak, adding fat, richness and a moist, glossy finish.

The step that matters

Covering the steak while the butter melts. Covering traps heat around the steak so the butter softens and spreads. Leaving the steak in the heat too long after it is cooked to your liking can dry the meat and toughen its outer layer.

“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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