Spice rub the salt for flavor and the sugar for caramelization. The simplest rub is just coarsely ground black pepper as in steak au poivre. Spice rubs can also have ingredients such as herbs, crushed garlic or oil added to make a paste. Less common ingredients can include coffee beans. Spice rubs are mainly used for preparing meats and fish. There are many different recipes for rubs and most of them are targeted towards a specific kind of food. The exact combination of spices that makes a good rub for a particular kind of food varies from region to region and culture
Oyster sauce of MSG and non-MSG variants is similar as oyster sauce naturally contains large amounts of glutamate. In 19th century French and English cooking, "oyster sauce" referred to a variant of sauce blanche flavoured with oysters, using a base of milk and melted butter rather than purely reducing the oysters by cooking. The white sauce version was moistened with cream, whereas in brown oyster sauce, the cream was replaced with gravy. Common recipes using the sauce included "Steak and oyster sauce", documented as early as 1806, and "Cod and oyster sauce". This sauce was still being eaten in Australia in the