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Beef Steak with Mushrooms

A porter‑house steak topped with sautéed mushrooms seasoned with wine, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Beef Steak with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan.

  2. Add the peeled mushrooms and cook until heated through.

  3. Season with wine, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  4. Pour the mushroom mixture over a nicely broiled porter-house steak on a platter.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,632 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

  4. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Mushroom + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,988 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and savory flavor, and helps the mushrooms brown in the pan.
Mushrooms
Provide moisture, soft texture, and earthy flavor to the sauce over the steak.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the mushrooms and cut the richness of the beef.
Porter-house steak
The main protein, whose broiled surface gives the dish its savory, browned flavor.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mushroom, wine, pepper. 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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