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Dessert

Aunt Helen's Suet Pudding

A suet pudding made with molasses, raisins, and a butter-sugar sauce, served with brandy, vanilla, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Aunt Helen's Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine suet, salt, molasses, baking soda, milk, flour, and raisins.

  2. Pour the mixture into a mold and boil for 3 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, cream together butter and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Beat the eggs until stiff and mix them into the creamed butter and sugar.

  3. Place the mixture in a double boiler and stir occasionally until it foams.

  4. Just before serving, add brandy, vanilla, nutmeg, and boiling water.

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 + raisintop 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. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Suet
Adds richness and moisture, giving the pudding a tender, steamed crumb.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Eggs
Whipped to stiffness, they add lift and bind the sauce mixture.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to add richness and a smooth, fine texture to the sauce.
New orleans molasses
Adds deep sweetness, dark color and a robust flavor to the pudding.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to help the pudding rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs until stiff. Stiffly beaten eggs trap air that lightens the sauce mixture. Under-beaten eggs leave it dense, and overbeating can make it collapse once combined.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, milk, flour, butter, sugar, egg, brandy):

  1. Raisinthe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Apricotfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, milk, flour, butter, sugar, egg, brandy. 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.

More suet pudding recipes

Lemon 28Boiled 19Steamed 12Potato 11Apple 10Raisin 10 See all 649 →

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