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Dessert

Half-pay Pudding

A suet pudding made with flour, breadcrumbs, currants, sultanas, treacle, and suet, boiled or steamed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Half-pay Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the flour, bread crumbs, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Add the chopped suet, currants, sultanas or raisins, and treacle.

  3. Stir in enough milk to form a stiff batter.

  4. Beat the mixture for five minutes.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour into a greased mold or basin.

  2. Boil for three hours or steam for four hours.

  3. Turn out and serve with a sweet sauce.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Adds bulk and softness, absorbing liquid to give a tender, light texture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking to help the pudding rise and lighten.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, depth of flavour and moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil or steam for the full time. Suet pudding is cooked through by long, steady heat in the basin. Cutting the time short leaves the centre dense and doughy, and boiling water must be kept topped up so the pudding cooks evenly.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, raisin, 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.

More suet pudding recipes

Lemon 28Boiled 19Steamed 12Potato 11Apple 10Raisin 10 See all 649 →

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