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Dessert

Boston Pudding

Boston Pudding is a boiled fruit pudding made with flour, butter, and various fruits, sweetened and spiced.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Boston Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Make a dough with the flour and butter (or suet).

  2. Roll out the dough to an even square shape, trimming the edges.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stew cranberries, gooseberries, dried peaches, or damsons with sugar.

  2. Stew apples with a little water, drain, and season with nutmeg, rosewater, and lemon.

  3. Mash currants, raspberries, or blackberries with sugar.

Assemble and boil

  1. Spread the prepared fruit thickly over the dough.

  2. Roll the dough up, sealing the ends and the last side.

  3. Tie the pudding in a cloth and boil it.

  4. Serve with sugar, and do not remove from the pot until just before serving.

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. Peach + appletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Peach + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the dough structure that holds the filling and sets when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the dough, carrying flavour through the pastry.
Beef suet
Can replace butter in the dough, giving a rich, tender, slightly crumbly texture.
Fruit
Provides the moist, tart or sweet filling that the dough is rolled around.

The step that matters

Sealing the roll. If the ends and seam are not sealed well, the filling can leak into the cloth and water during boiling, leaving the pudding dry and loose.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, peach, sugar, nutmeg, apple):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, peach, sugar, nutmeg, apple. 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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