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Dessert

Baroness Pudding

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

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

Boil and serve

  1. Wring a pudding cloth out of boiling water, dust it thickly with flour, tie the pudding up in it, and put it into a large pot of boiling water.

  2. Boil it steadily for four hours.

  3. Turn it out of the cloth, dust it thickly with powdered sugar, and serve it hot.

  4. Any pudding sauce may be served with it if desired.

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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  4. Bread + raisintop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,111 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Provide the bulk and body that hold the pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat and richness, keeping the pudding moist during long cooking.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Milk
Moistens the bread crumbs and helps bind the mixture.

The step that matters

Boil it steadily for four hours. The pudding must stay submerged in gently but continuously boiling water. If the water stops boiling, heat transfer slows and the pudding can turn heavy or undercooked. Topping up with boiling water keeps the cooking even.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, milk. 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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