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Virginia White Puddings

A suet-based pudding made with flour, cornmeal, salt, and pepper, boiled in cotton bags.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Virginia White Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the suet, flour, cornmeal, salt, and pepper together until well combined.

  2. Fill small cotton bags with the mixture, leaving space for the puddings to swell.

Boil and store

  1. Tie the bags tightly and boil them in water for six hours, ensuring they are well covered.

  2. Once cooled, hang the bags in a cool, dry place.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, remove the bag, slice the pudding thinly, and fry in a little butter.

  2. Serve very 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.

  1. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provides fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Forms the body of the pudding, giving it structure once boiled.
Cornmeal
Adds a coarser, grainy texture to the pudding's body.

The step that matters

Boil for the full six hours with the bags well covered. Suet and flour need long, steady cooking to set into a firm pudding. If the bags are not kept under water, they can dry out or cook unevenly, leaving the pudding crumbly or raw in the centre.

“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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