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Dessert

Peach or Apple Pudding

A steamed fruit pudding made with flour, suet, and fruit, topped with sugar and served with hard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Peach or Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine the flour and chopped suet.

  2. Add the salt and gradually stir in the cold water to form a soft dough.

  3. Roll the dough into a square sheet.

Assemble and cook

  1. Place peeled and sliced fruit in the center and sprinkle generously with sugar.

  2. Fold the dough over the fruit, pinching the edges to seal.

  3. Place the pudding in a steamer and cook for 2 hours.

  4. Serve with hard 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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

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

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the dough's structure, setting the body of the pudding as it steams.
Beef kidney suet
Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and moist during steaming.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit filling and draws out juices as it cooks.

The step that matters

Sealing the fold. Pinching the edges firmly keeps the fruit juices inside while steaming; a poor seal lets liquid escape and the filling can turn watery or soggy.

“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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