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Baroness Pudding

A suet and raisin pudding baked for hours, served with pounded sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove all skins from the suet and chop it very finely.

  2. Stone the raisins and cut each into four pieces.

  3. Mix the salt with the flour and rub the suet into it.

  4. Add the raisins and stir in the milk.

  5. Beat the mixture well for a few minutes.

Cook and serve

  1. Put it in a well-buttered mold and tie it up in a floured cloth.

  2. Boil for 4½ hours.

  3. Turn it out carefully onto a hot dish and sift pounded sugar on top 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 richness and fat, which keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the body of the pudding, giving structure once it is boiled and set.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Milk
Moistens the flour and suet into a mixture that binds the pudding together.

The step that matters

Boil for 4½ hours. The pudding must boil steadily for the full time so the flour starches set and the suet melts through. Under-cooking leaves it dense and wet in the centre.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

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