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Steak Pudding

A baked dish of beef or mutton wrapped in a suet and flour crust, cooked slowly in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Steak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, suet, and salt.

  2. Add cold water gradually until the mixture is stiff like pie crust.

  3. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick.

Assemble and bake

  1. Season the meat with pepper and salt.

  2. Place the meat in an earthen dish and add 1 cup of water.

  3. Cover the dish with the rolled-out dough.

  4. Cook in a 300°F (150°C) oven for 5 hours.

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the suet crust that encloses the meat.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and rich as it cooks.
Beef or mutton
Provides the main filling, which becomes tender during the long, slow cooking.
Water
Combines with the flour and suet to form a stiff dough and adds moisture to the filling.

The step that matters

Cover the dish with the rolled-out dough. The dough must seal the dish well so steam stays inside, keeping the meat moist during the long, slow cook.

“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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