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Beef-steak Pudding

A boiled pudding made with beef steak, potatoes, onion, mushroom ketchup, lemon pickle, and broth, wrapped in pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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-steak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the rump steaks with a chopper and cut them into pieces about half the size of your hand, trimming off all skin and sinews.

  2. Rub the inside of a basin or plain mold with butter, then line the basin with pastry for boiled puddings.

  3. Season the steak pieces with pepper, salt, and a little grated nutmeg.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Layer the steak and potato slices in the mold.

  2. Add some chopped onion between the layers.

  3. Add the mushroom ketchup, lemon pickle, and water or veal broth to the layers.

  4. Roll out a top pastry and seal it well to prevent water from entering.

Boil and serve

  1. Rinse a clean cloth in hot water and sprinkle a little flour over it.

  2. Tie up the pudding with the cloth.

  3. Boil a large pot of water and add the pudding to the boiling water.

  4. Cook for 2.5 hours.

  5. Remove the pudding from the pot and take off the cloth.

  6. Turn the pudding out onto a deep dish.

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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rump steaks
Provide the meaty filling that becomes tender during long, gentle boiling.
Potatoes
Add starch and body to the filling as they soften in the layers.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma that spreads through the filling.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami flavour to the meat and gravy.
Water or veal broth
Supplies moisture that cooks the filling and forms a savoury juice.

The step that matters

Seal the top pastry well. A tight seal keeps boiling water out, so the filling stays moist and flavourful rather than becoming waterlogged and diluted.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, butter, pepper, nutmeg, mushroom, ketchup, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, butter, pepper, nutmeg, mushroom, ketchup, lemon. 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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