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Ruth PINCH's Beef-steak Pudding

A steamed pudding made with a dough of flour, suet, and water, encasing seasoned rump steak and beaten egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 crust

  1. Mix the 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. Moisten the paste with beaten egg yolks or whole eggs mixed with a little water.

  4. Cover the steak with the remaining dough.

  5. 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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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 and structure that holds the pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and rich as it cooks.
Rump steak
Provides the meat filling that becomes tender during long gentle steaming.
Egg yolks
Bind and enrich the paste, helping it seal and brown slightly.

The step that matters

Covering the steak with dough. The top crust must be sealed fully against the basin edge so steam cannot escape and the filling stays moist during the long steaming.

“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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