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Preserve

Beef Steak Pudding

A savory pudding made with beef steaks, blanched oysters, potatoes or onions, and topped with dough, then boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Beef Steak Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, chopped suet, milk, salt, and egg until well combined.

  2. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick and line a bowl or basin with it.

Fill and cook

  1. Trim the skin from the steaks, beat them with a chopper, and cut into medium‑sized pieces.

  2. Season the meat with pepper and salt, then layer it in the bowl with blanched oysters and slices of potatoes or onions.

  3. Cover the top with the remaining dough and tie a cloth over the bowl.

  4. Boil the pudding for 2 hours.

  5. Before serving, add a little cullis and ketchup to the pudding.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

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

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 once mixed with liquid and egg.
Suet
Adds richness and a tender, moist texture to the pastry crust.
Egg
Binds the dough and helps hold it together during boiling.
Steaks
Provide the main meat filling, which becomes tender during long cooking.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding for 2 hours. The pudding must be kept at a steady simmer and covered tightly with its cloth so the steam cooks the filling through and the dough stays moist. Letting the water boil dry or lose its level can leave the meat tough or the crust underdone.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, egg, pepper, oyster, sauce, ketchup):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, pepper, oyster, sauce, ketchup. 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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