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Ruth Pinch’s Beef-steak Pudding

A steamed pudding made with a paste of flour, butter, salt, and egg yolks, encasing seasoned rump steak.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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

Prepare the paste

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, butter, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Moisten the mixture with the well-beaten yolks of four eggs or three whole eggs mixed with a little water.

  3. Butter a basin very thickly before laying in the paste.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Place the seasoned rump steak into the basin.

  2. Cover the steak with the paste.

  3. Ensure the pudding is sealed well.

Steam

  1. Steam for 3½ 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 structure of the paste once moistened and steamed.
Butter
Fat that coats flour strands, keeping the crust tender and short.
Eggs
Bind the paste and enrich it, helping it hold together.
Rump steak
Main filling, cooked gently by the steam inside the sealed crust.

The step that matters

Ensure the pudding is sealed well. Steaming relies on a tight seal so steam stays trapped and cooks the filling evenly, while keeping boiling water out of the basin.

“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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