Skip to main content
Main

Ruth Pinch's Beef-steak Pudding

A steamed pudding made with beef steak encased in a flour and suet dough.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Mix flour, suet (or butter), and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add enough water to form a dough.

  3. Roll out the dough and line a buttered basin thickly.

Fill and steam

  1. Cut the rump steak into pieces and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Place the steak in the lined basin.

  3. Cover with the remaining dough, sealing the edges.

  4. Steam for 3½ 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.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. 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 structure of the dough that encloses the filling.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and rich as it steams.
Rump steak
Provides the meat filling, which becomes tender during long gentle steaming.

The step that matters

Sealing the edges. Covering the steak with dough and sealing the edges traps steam and juices inside. A loose seal lets water into the basin during the long steam, which can make the crust soggy and dilute 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes