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Beef-steak Pudding

A boiled pudding of beef, potatoes, onions, and mushroom ketchup, wrapped in pastry and cooked in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beef-steak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the rump steaks with a chopper and cut them into pieces about half the size of your hand.

  2. Grease a basin or oval mold with butter and line it with pastry as directed for boiled puddings.

  3. Season the steak pieces with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

Assemble

  1. Layer the steak and potato slices in the mold, adding some chopped onion between layers.

  2. Add the mushroom ketchup, lemon pickle, and water or veal broth.

  3. Roll out a top pastry and seal it well to prevent water from entering.

Boil and serve

  1. Rinse a clean cloth in hot water, sprinkle flour over it, and tie it around the pudding.

  2. Boil a large pot of water and place the pudding in it, cooking for 2.5 hours.

  3. Remove the pudding, take off the cloth, and turn it out onto a deep dish.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rump steak
Provides the meat and savoury flavour that forms the body of the filling.
Potatoes
Add starch and body, soaking up the meat juices as the pudding cooks.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds deep, savoury umami flavour to the meat and broth.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth as it softens into the filling.
Water or veal broth
Provides moisture so the meat and potatoes cook through in the steam-boiled pudding.

The step that matters

Seal the top pastry well. A tight seal keeps boiling water from entering the pudding, which would make the filling soggy and dilute its flavour. Sealing also traps steam so the meat cooks gently and stays moist during the long boil.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, butter, pepper, nutmeg, mushroom, ketchup, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, butter, pepper, nutmeg, mushroom, ketchup, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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