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Dessert

Boiled Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet, raisins, grated bread, brown sugar, eggs, milk, spices, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Boiled Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix

  1. In a large bowl, combine the suet, raisins, grated bread, brown sugar, eggs, milk, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg, and mix until the mixture is as stiff as soft dough.

Cook

  1. Transfer the mixture to a pudding cloth or mold.

  2. Boil in a pot of water for four 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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist and tender as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as the pudding cooks.
Grated bread
Provides the body of the pudding, soaking up milk to form a soft dough.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds a molasses note to its flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic ingredients to help lighten the pudding's texture.

The step that matters

Boiling for four hours. The pudding is cooked by steady moist heat. If the water drops below a gentle simmer or the cloth is not sealed, the pudding can dry out or cook unevenly, so the water level and heat need checking throughout.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, bread, sugar, egg, milk, cinnamon, clove. 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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