Name: Cold Beef
Ingredients: Cold beef; Potatoes; Suet pudding with fruit

Why it works: Beef and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,052 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Cold Beef

Ingredients

Cold beef
Potatoes
Suet pudding with fruit

Directions

Serve cold beef as the main dish.
Boil or roast potatoes until tender.
Prepare suet pudding by mixing suet, flour, and fruit, then steam until cooked.

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.

Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,052 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold beef: Forms the main dish and provides the meaty centre of the meal.
Potatoes: Provide starch that becomes soft and fluffy when boiled or roasted until tender.
Suet: Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Flour (in the method): Gives the pudding structure by setting around the fat and fruit as it cooks.

“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.