Mastering Steak au Poivre

nytimes.com - Season well with salt and pepper: That’s the first step in countless recipes. It is generally good advice, more so if the salt is the good flaky stuff and the pepper is freshly ground.

For this simple steak au poivre recipe to be a success, both salt and pepper are needed, pressed generously against the meat. But the emphasis here is most assuredly upon the pepper.

Pepper provides far more than a pleasant hot sensation; there are hints of warm sweet spice that linger, and a fine woodsy aroma. Dishes like this one that make heavy use of black pepper achieve a kind of zingy roundness, which pairs well with red wine and seems to enhance other accompaniments.