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Dessert

Damson Pudding

A steamed pudding made with damsons, suet crust, and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Damson Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Make a suet crust with ½ lb. of flour.

  2. Line a buttered pudding basin with a portion of the crust.

Fill and seal

  1. Fill the basin with damsons and sweeten them.

  2. Cover with the lid and pinch the edges of the crust together to prevent juice from escaping.

Boil

  1. Tie a floured cloth over the basin and place it in boiling water.

  2. Boil for 2 to 3 hours.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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

Damsons
Provide the tart fruit filling and its juice, which the crust must contain.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the tart damsons and adds moisture to the fruit filling.
Suet or butter
Fat that makes the crust tender and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the structure of the crust that holds the filling together.

The step that matters

Pinch the crust edges shut. If the seal leaks, juice escapes into the boiling water and the filling dries out and thins the pudding. A tight seal keeps steam and juice inside the basin.

“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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