Skip to main content
Dessert

Gloucester Pudding

A steamed pudding made with raisins, suet, flour, milk, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Gloucester Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a basin, combine the flour, chopped suet, chopped and stoned raisins, sugar, grated lemon peel, and a little nutmeg.

  2. Beat the egg and mix it into the pudding mixture.

  3. Dissolve the carbonate of soda in a little milk and add it to the mixture.

  4. Add milk until the pudding reaches a proper consistency for cooking.

Cook

  1. Steam the pudding for three 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the bulk of the pudding structure once it sets with heat.
Suet
Adds richness and a moist, tender texture as it melts during cooking.
Egg
Binds the mixture and helps it set firm when cooked.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the moisture and helps the pudding rise and lighten.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the milk. The milk must be added gradually until the batter reaches a soft, pourable-but-thick consistency. Too little gives a dense, dry pudding, while too much makes it loose and heavy, and the flour needs enough liquid to hydrate and set properly during steaming.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, egg, milk, flour, sugar, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes