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Baroness Pudding

A boiled suet pudding with raisins, flour, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Baroness Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the suet by removing the skin and chopping it finely.

  2. Mix the suet, raisins, salt, and flour in a bowl, then moisten the mixture with milk and stir well.

Boil

  1. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth that has been wrung out of boiling water.

  2. Place the wrapped pudding in a saucepan of boiling water.

  3. Boil continuously for 4½ 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Suet
Provides fat that melts during boiling, keeping the pudding moist and rich.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Milk
Moistens the dry ingredients so they bind into a dough.

The step that matters

Keeping the water at a continuous boil. If the water stops boiling, the pudding cools and the suet and flour cannot cook through evenly, leaving it heavy. Topping up with boiling water helps maintain steady heat over the long cooking time.

“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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