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Dessert

A Nice Suet Pudding

A suet pudding made with mashed potatoes, suet, molasses, sugar, milk, raisins, spices, and flour, boiled for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

A Nice Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil and mash the potatoes.

  2. Mix the mashed potatoes with the chopped suet.

  3. Add the molasses, sugar, milk, chopped raisins, baking soda, allspice, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

  4. Work in enough flour to form a dough similar to bread.

Cook

  1. Place the mixture in a tin boiler and boil for three 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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch and moisture that bind the dense suet mixture into a soft pudding.
Suet
Adds richness and fat that gives the pudding its moist, tender texture.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and dark color along with a deep, robust flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses acidity to lighten the pudding and help it rise.
Flour
Adds structure so the mixture holds together as a bread-like dough.

The step that matters

Work in the flour to a bread-like dough. Too little flour leaves the mixture wet and loose, while too much makes the pudding dense and tough. Aim for a dough that holds its shape without becoming stiff.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, sugar, milk, raisin, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, sugar, milk, raisin, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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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