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Dessert

Boiled Currant Pudding

A boiled pudding made with currants, suet, milk, flour, and a pinch of salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the currants and dry them thoroughly, removing any stalks or grit.

  2. Chop the suet finely.

  3. Mix all the ingredients together and moisten with enough milk to make a stiff batter.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth.

  2. Place it in boiling water and boil for 3.5 hours.

  3. Serve with sweet jelly 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together while it boils.
Milk
Moistens the flour and suet into a stiff batter.
Currants
Add sweetness, fruit flavour and small pockets of chew throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Moistening the batter. Enough milk must be added to make a stiff batter. Too little leaves dry, crumbly flour that will not bind, while too much makes the pudding heavy and wet inside the cloth.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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.

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