Name: Suet Pudding
Ingredients: 16 oz. suet; 8 oz. bread; 16 oz. potatoes; water

Why it works: Bread and potato work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 434 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Suet Pudding

Ingredients

16 oz. suet
8 oz. bread
16 oz. potatoes
water

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

Grate the suet.
Mix the grated suet with the bread crumbs.
Add grated potatoes and enough water to form a dough.

Shape and boil

Shape the mixture into a pudding.
Place the pudding in a cloth.
Boil in water for about 1.5 hours.

Serve

Serve hot.

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.

Bread + potatotop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together434 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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.
Bread: Bread crumbs absorb liquid and give the pudding body and a soft crumb.
Potatoes: Grated potato adds moisture and starch that helps bind the dough.

“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.