Name: Onion Pudding
Ingredients: 3 large onions, finely chopped; ½ pound suet; 1 pint all-purpose flour; coarse sea salt, to taste

Why it works: Onion and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32,460 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Onion Pudding

Ingredients

3 large onions, finely chopped
½ pound suet
1 pint all-purpose flour
coarse sea salt, to taste

Directions

Prepare the mixture

Chop the onions finely.
Mix the chopped onions with the suet and flour.
Season with coarse sea salt.

Cook

Tie the mixture in a greased and floured bag.
Boil for 2½ hours.

Serve

Serve with roast meats.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together32,460 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions: Add moisture and savory sweetness as they cook into the pudding.
Suet: Adds fat that melts during cooking, keeping the pudding tender and moist.
All-purpose flour: Provides structure, setting the mixture into a firm pudding as it cooks.

“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.