Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Fruit Puddings
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the crust
Butter a mold or basin and line it with a pastry crust.
In a bowl, mix the flour and suet to form the crust.
Fill and seal
Fill the mold with fruit and add sugar and a little water if necessary.
Cover with more pastry, pressing the edges tightly together.
Tie down with a floured cloth and place in boiling water.
Cloth method and boiling
For some fruits, you can boil the pudding in a cloth instead.
Dip the cloth in hot water, stretch it over a basin, lay the pastry over, and fill with fruit.
Boil for one and a half hours.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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 main structure of the pastry crust that holds the filling.
- Suet
- Adds fat to the crust, giving it a rich, tender texture as it cooks.
- Fruit
- Provides the main filling, along with moisture and flavour as it cooks.
The step that matters
Pressing the edges tightly together. If the pastry seal is loose, the filling can leak out and water can get in during boiling, making the pudding soggy and diluting its flavour.
“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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