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Dessert

Honeycomb Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, milk, molasses, raisins, currants, baking soda, salt, and lemon essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Honeycomb Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the flour, suet, milk, molasses, raisins, currants, baking soda, salt, and lemon essence, and mix until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

Cook

  1. Boil the pudding for 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist during long cooking.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark colour and a moist, deep flavour.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and moisture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for 3 hours. Long, steady cooking is needed to set the flour and suet fully. Keeping the water at a gentle boil, and topping it up as needed, prevents the pudding from drying out or turning heavy and undercooked.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, molasses, raisin, currant. 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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