Name: Beef Steak Pudding
Ingredients: Beef steak, cut into small pieces; Pudding paste (enough to roll out to ½ inch thick); Flour, for dusting; Coarse sea salt, to taste; Water, for boiling

Why it works: Beef and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beef Steak Pudding

Ingredients

Beef steak, cut into small pieces
Pudding paste (enough to roll out to ½ inch thick)
Flour, for dusting
Coarse sea salt, to taste
Water, for boiling

Directions

Prepare the pudding

Roll out the pudding paste to ½ inch thick.
Wring a pudding cloth out of boiling water and dust flour over it.
Place the cloth over a pudding bowl.

Assemble

Add the steak pieces, seasoned with salt, into the bowl.
Cover the steak completely with the pudding paste, folding it neatly over.
Fold the corners of the pudding cloth over the mixture.

Boil

Place the bowl into a pot of boiling water.
Boil for 2 to 3 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.

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

Beef steak: Provides the savoury meat filling that becomes tender during the long simmering.
Pudding paste: Encloses the filling and forms a soft, steamed outer crust.
Flour: Dusted on the cloth so the pudding paste does not stick to it.

“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.