Skip to main content
Main

Pudding

A savory pudding made with thinly sliced rump steaks, onions, potatoes, and pastry, baked in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the rump steaks into thin pieces and trim off skin and sinews.

  2. Peel and chop the onions.

  3. Peel and slice the potatoes into ¼ inch thick slices.

  4. Rub the inside of a mold or basin with butter.

  5. Cover the mold with pastry.

Assemble

  1. Season the steaks with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Layer the steaks and potatoes in the mold, sprinkling some chopped onions between the layers.

  3. Add 4 tablespoons of mushroom catsup, a little lemon pickle, and ⅓ cup of broth or water.

  4. Roll out a top pastry and seal the edges by wetting them and pressing together.

Boil and serve

  1. Dip a clean cloth in hot water and sprinkle the cloth with flour.

  2. Tie the cloth around the pudding.

  3. Place the pudding in a large pot of boiling water and boil for 2.5 hours.

  4. Remove the cloth.

  5. Turn the pudding out onto a dish.

  6. Remove the mold.

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 main meat, which becomes tender during the long boil.
Potatoes
Add starch and body, soaking up the meat juices as the pudding cooks.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and aroma as they soften in the steam.
Flour
Dusts the cloth so the pudding releases from it and forms a dry outer skin.
Mushroom catsup
Adds concentrated savory, umami depth to the meat and juices.

The step that matters

Seal the edges of the top pastry. A tight seal keeps the filling moist and stops boiling water from seeping in and diluting the juices during the long cook.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

More meat pudding recipes

Roman 4Boiled 3Cold 3Macaroni 3Potato 3 See all 35 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes