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Dessert

Black Currant Pudding

A boiled pudding made with beef suet dough and black currants, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Black Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the chopped beef suet with flour and water to form a soft dough.

  2. Add salt and baking powder, then roll out the dough into a sheet.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Grease a pudding bowl and line the sides with the dough.

  2. Fill the bowl with black currants and sprinkle with sugar.

  3. Cover with a top crust made from the remaining dough.

Boil and serve

  1. Cover the bowl with a floured cloth and boil for 2½ hours.

  2. Serve with a hot 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + black curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + black curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and moist as it steams.
All-purpose flour
Forms the dough's structure, holding it together around the fruit.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the dough rises and stays light.
Black currants
Provide tart fruit flavour and juice that soaks into the crust.
Sugar
Sweetens the black currants and balances their natural tartness.

The step that matters

Boil for 2½ hours. Boiling must be kept steady and the bowl covered so the pudding cooks through by steam. Too little heat or an uncovered bowl leaves the dough heavy and undercooked.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, sugar. 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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