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Veal Pudding

A steamed veal and ham pudding cooked in boiling water and served with bone gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and ham are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,264 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Veal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the basin

  1. Grease a basin and line it thinly with suet paste.

  2. Add the veal pieces and intersperse with strips of ham, bacon, or pork.

  3. Season generously with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  4. Nearly fill the basin with boiling water and cover with a thin lid of paste.

Steam and serve

  1. Cover with greased paper and place in a steamer or saucepan with boiling water halfway up the basin.

  2. Add more boiling water as needed during cooking.

  3. Cook for 3 hours and serve with gravy made from the bones and trimmings.

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. Veal + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,264 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

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

  3. Ham + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the pudding and becomes tender during long, gentle steaming.
Raw ham, bacon, or pickled pork
Adds salty, savoury flavour and fat that moistens the lean veal as it cooks.
Suet paste
Forms a sturdy crust that encloses the filling and holds in moisture during steaming.

The step that matters

Keeping the water topped up during steaming. The pudding cooks by gentle steam over a long time. If the boiling water drops too low, the basin dries out and the meat and crust can toughen or scorch, so the level must be maintained.

“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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