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Snipe Pudding

A steamed pudding made with clarified suet, flour, salt, water, snipes, thin steak, bacon, and beef essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Snipe Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Chop the clarified suet very finely and dredge a little flour over it as you mince it.

  2. Mix the suet with flour, salt, and enough water to make a smooth, pliant paste.

  3. Roll out the paste to at least ½ inch thick.

Fill the basin

  1. Rub a basin with butter and line it with the rolled paste.

  2. Place a thin steak at the bottom, add the snipes with bacon slices in between, and cover with another thin steak.

  3. Pour in the essence of beef before sealing the paste.

Steam

  1. Tie the basin with a cloth and steam the pudding slowly for three 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 + 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

Clarified suet
Provides fat that keeps the paste short and tender as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Forms the paste's structure, giving it body to hold the filling.
Snipes
Form the main filling, cooking through in the steam within the paste.
Bacon slices
Add fat and savoury flavour that seeps into the surrounding meat and paste.
Essence of beef
Adds concentrated meaty flavour and moisture to the filling.

The step that matters

Sealing the paste with enough water. The paste must be smooth and pliant so it rolls without cracking and seals the basin tightly. A tight seal traps steam, which cooks the filling evenly over the long steaming time.

“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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