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Beefsteak Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, and beef pieces, seasoned with pepper, salt, and ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and ketchup are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,435 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Beefsteak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Remove strings from the suet and grind it to a powder.

  2. Chop the suet into the flour, add a pinch of salt, and mix with the water to form a stiff paste.

  3. Butter the inside of a round bowl and line it with the paste, keeping it no thicker than 1 inch.

Fill and cover

  1. Fill the bowl with the cut meat, sprinkling each layer with pepper, salt, and dashes of ketchup.

  2. Cover the top with a piece of pastry cut to fit, pinching the edges together.

  3. Tie a floured pudding cloth over the top, ensuring it is secure but not too tight.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the mold in a pot of boiling water, ensuring it is well covered, and boil for 2 hours, adding water as needed.

  2. When done, briefly plunge the mold upside down in cold water, untie the cloth, and carefully turn the pudding out onto a dish.

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. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + ketchuptop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,207 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 stiff paste that encloses the filling and holds its shape.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pastry and keeps it tender during long boiling.
Round steak
Provides the meat filling that becomes tender through long, gentle cooking.
Cold water
Hydrates the flour so the suet and flour bind into a workable dough.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding. The mold must stay well covered by boiling water for the full two hours, since exposed pastry dries out and the meat cooks unevenly. Topping up the water keeps the level steady.

“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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