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Beef and Oyster Pudding

A savory pudding made with beef, oysters, suet, milk, and lemon, steamed or boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 and Oyster Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. In a basin, mix suet and salt thoroughly.

  2. Add milk and a little water to form a paste.

  3. Roll out the paste to ¼ inch thick and line a pudding basin.

  4. Reserve a piece of paste for the top.

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut beef across the grain into thin slices.

  2. Mix flour, salt, and pepper on a plate; dip one side of meat slices in it and roll each in a small piece of fat.

  3. Remove gills from oysters.

Assemble and cook

  1. Layer beef and oysters in the basin, adding grated lemon rind, stock, and lemon juice between layers.

  2. Wet the edge of the paste crust, cover with reserved paste, and press edges firmly.

  3. Cover with greased paper or tie with a floured pudding cloth, allowing room for the crust to swell.

  4. Place the pudding in a stewpan half-filled with boiling water and cook for 2.5 hours or steam for 3 hours.

  5. Remove the cloth, turn out the pudding onto a hot dish, and serve.

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Milk + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Suet
Forms the rich paste that makes the crust tender and moist as it cooks.
Beef
Provides the main meaty filling, which becomes tender during long gentle cooking.
Oysters
Adds a briny, savoury flavour that deepens the filling.
Flour
Lightly coats the beef, helping it brown and thicken the juices around it.
Milk
Moistens the suet paste so it can be rolled and lined in the basin.

The step that matters

Allowing room for the crust to swell. The paste and filling expand as they heat, so leaving space under the paper or cloth prevents the cover from bursting or pressing the crust out of shape during the long cook.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, beef, flour, pepper, oyster):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Cherryfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, beef, flour, pepper, oyster. 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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