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Beefsteak Pudding

A steamed pudding made with thinly sliced steak rolled in dough and suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,964 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Beefsteak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the steak into thin slices across the grain.

  2. Mix the flour, salt, and pepper on a plate, then dip each piece of meat in the mixture.

  3. Place a small piece of fat on each strip of lean meat and roll it up.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Add water to form a dough.

  3. Incorporate the chopped suet and bread crumbs.

Steam

  1. Wrap the meat rolls in the dough and steam for about 1 hour.

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 + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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 and coats the meat so the surface can brown and hold the dressing.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dough and meat rolls moist and rich during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping it rise and turn light and tender.
Steak
Provides the meat filling, which becomes tender through long, gentle steaming.

The step that matters

Wrapping the meat rolls in the dough. The dough must seal fully around the meat so juices and steam do not escape. A gap lets the filling dry out or leak during the long steam.

“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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