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Paste for Boiled Puddings

A mixture of beef suet, flour, salt, and milk or water used as a base for boiled puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,759 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Paste for Boiled Puddings

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the beef suet very fine.

Make the paste

  1. In a bowl, mix the chopped suet with the flour and salt.

  2. Add the milk or water and beat well with a rolling pin to incorporate the suet with the flour.

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 + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 paste when it is combined with liquid.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the paste rich and tender as it cooks.
Milk or water
Hydrates the flour so the mixture binds into a dough.

The step that matters

Beating the suet into the flour. Fat that is evenly distributed and coats the flour particles limits gluten formation and keeps the paste tender. Unevenly mixed suet leaves greasy streaks and tough or patchy spots.

“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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