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Dessert

Plain Boiled Pudding

A simple boiled pudding made with flour, buttermilk, suet, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Plain Boiled Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Dissolve the baking soda in a little hot water.

  2. In a large bowl, stir the buttermilk into the flour gradually until smooth.

  3. Add the dissolved baking soda, suet, and salt, and mix thoroughly.

Boil

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

  2. Boil for 1.5 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 + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Buttermilk or sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity, and the acid reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the buttermilk or sour cream to release gas that lightens the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.

The step that matters

Add the dissolved baking soda, suet, and salt, and mix thoroughly. Baking soda starts releasing gas as soon as it meets the acid in the buttermilk or sour cream. Mixing it in promptly and evenly spreads those bubbles through the batter, so the pudding rises uniformly instead of forming dense pockets.

“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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