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Pudding and Ordinary Diet

A pudding made from undressed meat, potatoes, beef suet, and flour, boiled or roasted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,052 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Pudding and Ordinary Diet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil or roast the meat alternately.

  2. Peel and boil the potatoes until tender.

Make and cook the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix the beef suet and flour to form a pudding batter.

  2. Steam or boil the pudding until cooked through.

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. Potato + beeftop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Meat + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour 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

Meat
Provides the savoury, protein-rich bulk of the filling.
Potatoes
Add starch and a soft, tender body to the dish.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding batter rich and tender.
Flour
Forms the structure of the batter as it cooks and sets.

The step that matters

Cooking the pudding through. The flour batter needs sustained gentle heat by steaming or boiling to set fully. Undercooked flour stays dense and gummy and tastes raw, so the pudding must be cooked all the way through.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, beef, flour):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Okrafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, beef, flour. 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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