Skip to main content
Dessert

Cherry-and-currant Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, cherries, currants, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cherry-and-currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix flour and salt.

  2. Add suet and cold water.

  3. Combine to form dough quickly and lightly.

  4. Roll dough out to ½ inch thick.

Fill and cook

  1. Butter a quart bowl and line it with the dough, leaving about 1 inch above the bowl.

  2. From the trimmings, roll out a top crust for the pudding.

  3. Fill the bowl with cherries and currants. Sprinkle sugar on each layer.

  4. Cover with the top crust. Tie a cloth over the bowl.

  5. Boil for 2 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. 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. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  4. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  5. Beef + curranttop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,464 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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 once mixed with water and suet.
Beef kidney suet
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and rich.
Cold water
Binds the flour and suet into a dough without overworking it.
Cherries
Provide the main fruit filling and its juice, which moistens the pudding.
Currants
Add tart, concentrated fruit flavour and chewy texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Combine the dough quickly and lightly. Overworking dough develops gluten and makes a tough crust, while cold fat kept in pieces helps the pastry stay tender and flaky.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, 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.

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes