Name: Superlative Beef-pudding
Ingredients: 1 fine woodcock (or 6 rice-birds); Beef for pudding

Why it works: Rice and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,265 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Superlative Beef-pudding

Ingredients

1 fine woodcock (or 6 rice-birds)
Beef for pudding

Directions

Prepare

Prepare the woodcock or rice-birds for cooking.
Place the bird in the center of a large beef pudding.

Assemble and cook

Surround the bird with beef, covering it completely.
Cook the pudding by boiling for at least 4 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.

Rice + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,265 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Woodcock or rice-birds: Forms the centre filling that is the main feature of the pudding.
Beef: Encloses the bird and forms the outer pudding body as it cooks.

“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.