Skip to main content
Dessert

Suet Crust

A dough made from suet, flour, baking powder, salt, and cold water, used as a crust for meat or fruit pies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Suet Crust

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Chop the suet very fine.

  2. Mix the suet with the flour, then sprinkle in the salt and baking powder.

  3. Make a hole in the center and gradually pour in the water, mixing in the flour from the sides.

  4. Knead the mixture lightly together.

  5. Roll out the dough to a thickness of ½ inch.

Fill and cook

  1. Use as a meat crust or fill with chopped apples, lemons, or canned fruit.

  2. Tie up in a cloth and steam or boil 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 + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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 dough once mixed with water.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the crust rich and tender as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the crust rise and lighten.
Cold water
Binds the flour and fat into a dough without making it tough when mixed lightly.

The step that matters

Knead the mixture lightly together. Overworking flour dough develops gluten and makes the crust tough and dense, so the dough should be brought together gently and only until it holds.

“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 suet crust recipes

for Pies 9for Meat Pies 4for Puddings 3 See all 30 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes