Name: To Make a Steak Pudding
Ingredients: 2 cups all-purpose flour; 1 cup finely shredded suet; cold water (as needed); coarse sea salt (to taste); 2 steaks (beef or mutton, well seasoned with pepper and salt)

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 ↓

To Make a Steak Pudding

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup finely shredded suet
cold water (as needed)
coarse sea salt (to taste)
2 steaks (beef or mutton, well seasoned with pepper and salt)

Directions

Prepare the dough

In a bowl, mix the flour and suet with enough cold water to form a stiff dough.
Season the dough with a little coarse sea salt.

Assemble and boil

Prepare the steaks by seasoning them with pepper and salt.
Shape the dough around the steaks like an apple pudding.
Tie the pudding in a cloth and place it in boiling water.
Boil a large pudding for 5 hours or a small one 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.

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 gluten structure that holds the stiff dough together around the steaks.
Suet: Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and moist during long boiling.
Steaks: Provide the meat filling that cooks slowly inside the dough wrapper.

The step that matters

Dough consistency. The dough must be stiff enough to hold its shape around the steaks. Too much water makes it slack and it may tear or leak during the long boil, letting water into the filling.

“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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To Make a Steak Pudding