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Dessert

A Delicious Nut Pudding

A steamed pudding made with nuts, raisins, figs, suet, molasses, and sweet cream sauce.

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

A Delicious Nut Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine ground suet and molasses.

  2. Dissolve baking soda in sour milk and add to the mixture.

  3. In another bowl, mix chopped nuts, raisins, and flour with nutmeg.

  4. Combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix well.

  5. Grease 1-pound coffee cans and fill them with the mixture.

  6. Steam the cans for 2½ to 3 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, beat together powdered sugar and butter until creamy.

  2. Whip the sweet cream and fold it into the butter mixture.

  3. Place the sauce in a double boiler and cook until foamy and smooth.

  4. Add vanilla to the sauce and serve it over the pudding.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Walnut + figtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together373 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Walnut + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Fig + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together510 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dense, moist pudding together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Sour milk
Its acidity activates the baking soda and adds tang to the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the steamed pudding rich and tender.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and moisture to the pudding.
Sweet cream
Whipped and folded in, it lightens the butter sauce and adds richness.

The step that matters

Steaming the cans for 2½ to 3 hours. The pudding sets through gentle, steady steam. Too little water or heat leaves it dry or dense, while boiling water can push steam into the cans and make the pudding uneven.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, raisin, fig, nutmeg, flour, molasses, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, raisin, fig, nutmeg, flour, molasses, 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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