Skip to main content
Main

Pudding Basin Steak

A dish of thinly sliced steak wrapped in pastry and boiled in a pudding basin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pudding Basin Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pastry

  1. Roll out the pastry dough to about ½ inch thick.

  2. Butter a round-bottomed pudding basin and line it with the pastry, leaving some over the edge.

Fill and seal

  1. Cut the steak into small, thin pieces and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Roll each piece of steak with a little fat and parsley.

  3. Place the rolled steak pieces in the basin and pour a small amount of water over them.

  4. Roll out the remaining pastry and cover the top of the basin, pressing it down with your thumb.

  5. Tie the basin in a floured pudding cloth.

Steam

  1. Place the basin in a saucepan with 1 gallon of boiling water and keep it boiling for nearly 2 hours, adding more water as needed.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Pastry dough
Forms the sealed crust that encloses the steak and holds in steam while it cooks.
Steak
Provides the meat filling, which becomes tender through long gentle steaming.
Fat
Adds richness and moisture to the steak pieces as they cook.

The step that matters

Keeping the water boiling. Steaming relies on a steady supply of boiling water. If the level drops or the water stops boiling, the pudding cooks unevenly and the steak can turn out tough, so top up with boiling water as needed.

“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 steak pudding recipes

Beef 24 See all 31 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes