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Beefsteak Imperial

A rare porterhouse steak served with butter, salt, pepper, and juice from a second steak.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper 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 ↓

Beefsteak Imperial

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Broil the porterhouse steak until it is rare.

  2. Broil the thick, juicy steak in another broiler, ensuring it remains rare.

  3. Preheat a plate.

  4. Add a few pieces of butter to the bottom.

Finish the steak

  1. Just before the porterhouse steak is ready, press the thick steak in a strong squeezer to extract the juice.

  2. Pour the extracted juice over the porterhouse steak.

  3. Sprinkle coarse sea salt and black pepper generously over the steak.

  4. Place the steak in the oven briefly to warm it up.

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 + peppertop 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

Porterhouse steak
Main cut that is cooked rare and served as the centrepiece of the dish.
Thick, juicy steak
Supplies its extracted juice, which is poured over the porterhouse to add moisture and beefy flavour.
Good butter
Melts on the warm plate to add richness and fat to the serving.

The step that matters

Pressing the juice from the thick steak. Timing matters: the juice must be extracted just before the porterhouse is ready, since the squeezed juice is poured over the hot steak and the meat should stay rare rather than overcooking while the second steak is handled.

“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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