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Suet Pudding

A steamed suet pudding flavored with molasses and raisins, served with a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine molasses, milk, chopped suet, raisins, flour, baking powder, and flavoring. Mix until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

  3. Steam for 2 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, cream together butter and flour in a saucepan.

  2. Add boiling water gradually, stirring until smooth.

  3. Flavor and sweeten the sauce to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding warm with the sauce.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Molasses
Provides sweetness, dark color, and a rich, moist texture to the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the pudding batter and thickens the sauce.
Baking powder
Releases gas that leavens the batter so the pudding rises and lightens.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the batter into a smooth, pourable mixture.
Raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and moisture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. The pudding must steam gently and stay covered with water or steam for the full time. Steam keeps the surface moist and sets the batter evenly, so letting the heat or water level drop can leave the texture dense or dry.

“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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