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Roast Beef with Batter Pudding

Roast beef served with a batter pudding made from eggs, milk, flour, salt, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Roast Beef with Batter Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the beef

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Place the beef in a pan and lay the slice of suet on top. Dredge the beef with flour.

  3. Roast for 10 minutes per pound for rare, lowering the oven temperature after the first 30 minutes.

  4. Once done, remove the roast from the pan and keep warm on a platter.

Make the batter pudding

  1. Beat the eggs and add the milk for the batter pudding. Sift the flour with the salt and baking powder.

  2. Add the sifted flour mixture to the egg mixture and beat thoroughly.

  3. Pour the batter into the hot dripping pan.

  4. Bake the batter pudding for 20 minutes.

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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. 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

Rump beef
Forms the main roast, providing the meat that is cooked to a rare doneness.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set and rise as it bakes.
Flour
Gives the batter its structure as it sets in the oven.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter, keeping the pudding tender.
Suet
Adds fat that bastes the beef and carries flavour during roasting.

The step that matters

Pour the batter into the hot dripping pan. The pan must be very hot when the batter goes in, so the outside begins to set and puff immediately instead of becoming greasy and flat.

“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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