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Dessert

Baroness Pudding

A boiled suet and raisin pudding made with flour, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the suet finely.

  2. Mix the chopped suet, raisins, flour, and salt in a bowl.

  3. Moisten the mixture with the milk and stir well.

Boil and serve

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

  2. Boil the pudding in hot water for 2.5 hours without ceasing.

  3. Sprinkle with sugar and serve with your preferred sauce.

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
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the body of the pudding, setting it into a firm, sliceable mass.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Milk
Moistens the dry ingredients so they hold together into a dough.

The step that matters

Keeping the water boiling for the full cooking time. Boiling is needed to steam the pudding evenly and set it. If the water drops below a boil, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn heavy and soggy.

“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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