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Dessert

Devonshire Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, currants, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Devonshire Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a large bowl, combine the flour, suet, and currants.

  2. Add enough eggs to moisten the mixture.

Cook

  1. Shape the mixture into a pudding and wrap it in a cloth.

  2. Boil the pudding for five 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as it sets around the other ingredients.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist during long cooking.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help it set firm.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for five hours. Long, steady boiling gives the flour and eggs time to cook through and set, so the pudding holds together and is not doughy. The cloth wrap keeps its shape while it cooks.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg. 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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