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A Steak Pudding

A savory pudding made by wrapping seasoned beef or mutton steaks in a suet and flour dough and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Steak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the shredded suet with flour and coarse sea salt.

  2. Add cold water gradually to form a stiff dough.

Assemble and boil

  1. Prepare the seasoned beef or mutton steaks.

  2. Shape the dough around the steaks like an apple pudding.

  3. Tie the pudding in a cloth securely.

  4. Boil in water for 3 hours if small, or 5 hours if large.

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 + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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
Melts during boiling to keep the dough moist and tender and adds richness.
All-purpose flour
Forms the stiff dough that wraps and holds the filling together.
Beef or mutton steaks
Provide the meat filling that cooks gently inside the dough.

The step that matters

Tying the pudding in the cloth. The cloth must be tied securely so water cannot soak into the dough during the long boil. Water entering the pudding would make the dough 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.

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