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Beefsteak French Style

Beefsteak French Style is a pan‑cooked steak served with butter, parsley, lemon, and fried potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Beefsteak French Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steaks

  1. Sprinkle the steaks with pounded salt, cayenne, and white pepper.

  2. Place the steaks in a pan with the pieces of fresh butter.

  3. Squeeze half a lemon over the butter in the pan.

Make the parsley butter

  1. Mix the flour with 3 ounces of fresh butter and minced parsley. Roll the mixture. Cut the mixture into large slices.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook the steaks until done.

  2. Place the cooked steaks on the butter.

  3. Wash the sliced potatoes in milk and water. Fry the potatoes in the butter and gravy from the steaks until rich brown.

  4. Add more seasoning if necessary.

  5. Serve.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Thin steaks from the rump
Form the main body of the dish and provide the meat that is cooked through.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and forms the gravy with the steak juices for frying the potatoes.
Flour
Thickens the butter and parsley mixture so it can be rolled and sliced.
Raw peeled potatoes
Become crisp and browned when fried in the butter and steak gravy.

The step that matters

Fry the potatoes until rich brown. Potato slices need enough hot fat and steady heat to brown on the surface; pale, under-fried potatoes stay soft and starchy inside, and overcrowding the pan steams them instead.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, flour, parsley, lemon, potato, milk):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, flour, parsley, lemon, potato, milk. 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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