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Ruth PINCH’s Beef-steak Pudding

A savory pudding made with flour, butter, water, rump steak, salt, pepper, and eggs, steamed for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Make the dough

  1. Mix flour, salt, and butter in a bowl.

  2. Add water gradually to form a dough.

Prepare the basin

  1. Butter a pudding basin thickly.

  2. Line the basin with the dough.

Fill and steam

  1. Fill with chopped rump steak, salt, and pepper.

  2. Cover with more dough and seal the edges.

  3. 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's structure, holding the pudding together while it steams.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the dough and enriches its flavour (suet works the same way).
Rump steak
Forms the savoury filling, which cooks slowly in the steam and becomes tender.

The step that matters

Seal the edges of the dough lid. A tight seal keeps steam inside the basin, so the filling cooks gently in moist heat and the dough stays cooked rather than leaking out.

“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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