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Dessert

Baroness Pudding

A suet pudding made with stale bread crumbs, raisins, suet, sugar, and milk, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Baroness Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shred the suet and chop it finely.

  2. Seed and chop the raisins.

  3. Mix together the suet, raisins, bread crumbs, 4 ounces of sugar, and the milk.

Cook

  1. Wring a pudding cloth out of boiling water, dust it thickly with flour, and wrap the pudding mixture in it.

  2. Place it into a large pot of boiling water and boil steadily for 4 hours.

Serve

  1. Turn it out of the cloth, dust it thickly with powdered sugar, and serve hot with any desired pudding 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Stale bread crumbs
Forms the main body of the pudding and soaks up the milk and fat.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness to the pudding.
Milk
Moistens the bread crumbs so the mixture binds together.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling steadily for the full 4 hours. Boiling water cooks the pudding evenly through the cloth. If the pot drops to a lower simmer, the pudding cooks slowly and unevenly, and the water level must be topped up with boiling water to keep the heat steady.

“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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