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Dessert

Boiled Currant Pudding

A boiled pudding made from currants, suet, salt, and milk, tied in a floured cloth and cooked for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the currants, removing any stalks or grit.

  2. Finely chop the suet.

Make and boil

  1. Mix all ingredients together and add enough milk to form a stiff batter.

  2. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth.

  3. Place in boiling water and boil for 3.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweet jelly 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

Milk and flour 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

Suet
Adds fat that makes the pudding rich and keeps its crumb tender as it cooks.
Currants
Add sweetness and fruity flavour, and their moisture is released into the pudding as it steams.
Milk
Moistens the dry ingredients so they bind into a stiff batter that holds its shape.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling for the full cooking time. Steamed puddings cook through gentle heat from boiling water. If the water stops boiling, heat transfer slows and the centre may stay heavy and undercooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

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