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Beefsteak French Style

Beefsteak cooked with butter, flour, parsley, lemon, and served with 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. Mix the flour with 3 ounces of fresh butter and minced parsley. Roll the mixture and cut it into large slices.

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

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. 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
Provide the main meat, which cooks through in the pan and releases gravy.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and helping the steaks and potatoes brown.
Flour
Thickens the butter and gravy so they cling to the steaks and potatoes.
Raw peeled potatoes
Fry in the butter and gravy, browning on the surface and softening inside.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the potatoes until rich brown. Browning needs direct contact with hot fat and a dry surface. Washed potato slices must be dried well, or they steam instead of browning, and the gravy may burn if the heat is too high.

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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