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Old-Fashioned Broiled Beef-steak and Gravy

A broiled sirloin steak served with a gravy made from butter, pepper, salt, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Old-Fashioned Broiled Beef-steak and Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Notch the edges of the steak to prevent curling and beat it out according to thickness.

  2. Prepare a charcoal fire in the ash pan and cover with a pan to create a draft.

  3. Rub the griddle bars with bacon rind and place the steak on it.

Cook and make the gravy

  1. Cook the steak medium well over the clear coals.

  2. In a tin pan, combine butter, black pepper, and salt, then press the hot steak into the mixture.

  3. Add hot water to the pan and set it over the coals to simmer until the gravy thickens.

Serve

  1. Serve the steak on a hot platter, carved into pieces, with a spoonful of gravy on each piece.

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

Sirloin steak
Provides the meat that is cooked and carved, with its fat carrying flavour through the dish.
Bacon rind
Rubbed on the griddle bars, it adds fat that keeps the steak from sticking and adds savoury flavour.
Butter
Melts into the pan with the pepper and salt, adding fat and richness to the gravy.
Hot water
Dissolves the pan juices and seasonings, then simmers to thicken into a gravy.

The step that matters

Pressing the hot steak into the butter mixture. The steak must be hot so the butter, pepper and salt coat its surface and begin the gravy's flavour base. Pressing it in helps the seasoning adhere evenly.

“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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