Name: Ruth Pinch’s Beef-Steak Pudding
Ingredients: 1 lb flour; 6 oz butter (or suet); ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ½ pint water; 1 lb rump steak; ¼ oz coarse sea salt; ½ teaspoon pepper; ¼ pint water

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ruth Pinch’s Beef-Steak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

In a bowl, mix flour, butter, and coarse sea salt.
Add enough water to form a dough.

Assemble the pudding

Butter a pudding basin thickly.
Line the basin with the dough.
In another bowl, season the rump steak with coarse sea salt and pepper.
Place the seasoned steak into the lined basin.
Cover the steak with the remaining dough.

Steam

Steam 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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 that encloses the filling and holds its shape while steaming.
Butter: Adds richness and tenderness to the pastry and helps keep it from sticking to the basin.
Rump steak: Provides the meat filling that cooks gently in the steam within the pastry.

“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.