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Ruth Pinch's Beef-Steak Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, and chopped rump steak, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ruth Pinch's Beef-Steak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix flour, suet (or butter), and coarse sea salt in a bowl.

  2. Add enough water to form a dough.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Butter a pudding basin thickly.

  2. Line the basin with the dough.

  3. Fill with chopped rump steak, salt, and pepper.

  4. Cover with more dough and seal the edges.

Steam

  1. Steam for 3 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms the dough that encloses the filling and gives the pudding its structure.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and moist as it steams.
Rump steak
Provides the main filling, which becomes tender during long steaming.

The step that matters

Seal the edges. A tight seal keeps steam and juices inside the pudding while it cooks, so the filling stays moist and the dough does not come apart.

“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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