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Steak Pudding

A boiled meat pudding made with beef, suet, flour, and water, wrapped in dough and cooked for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Steak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix flour, suet, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add cold water until the mixture is stiff like pie crust.

  3. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick.

Assemble and cook

  1. Season the meat with pepper and salt.

  2. Place the seasoned meat in an earthen dish with 1 cup of water.

  3. Cover the dish with the rolled-out dough.

  4. Cook in an Aladdin Pail for 5 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.

  1. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the dough's structure, giving it body so it holds together while cooking.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and moist as it cooks.
Beef or mutton
Provides the main filling, which becomes tender with long, slow cooking.
Water
Creates moist steam in the dish that helps cook the meat gently.

The step that matters

Adding cold water to the dough. Too much water makes the dough sticky and tough, while too little leaves it crumbly. Stiff, pie-crust-like dough holds its shape and seals the dish well during the long cook.

“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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