Name: Plain Boiled Pudding
Ingredients: 3 heaping cups of flour; 2 cups of buttermilk or soured milk; 1 full teaspoon of baking soda, dissolved in boiling water; ½ cup of powdered suet; 1 teaspoon of salt

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

3 heaping cups of flour
2 cups of buttermilk or soured milk
1 full teaspoon of baking soda, dissolved in boiling water
½ cup of powdered suet
1 teaspoon of salt

Directions

Make the batter

Gradually stir the buttermilk into the flour until free from lumps.
Add the salt and suet.
Quickly beat in the baking soda water.

Boil and serve

Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.
Boil for one and a half hours.
Serve hot with 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.

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

Flour: Forms the main structure of the pudding as its starch sets during boiling.
Buttermilk: Adds moisture and acidity, and reacts with the baking soda to help the pudding rise.
Baking soda: Reacts with the acid in the buttermilk to release gas that lightens the pudding.
Suet: Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.

The step that matters

Quickly beat in the baking soda water. Baking soda starts releasing gas as soon as it meets the acid in the buttermilk. If the batter sits before it goes into the mold and boils, some of that lift is lost and the pudding comes out denser.

“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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Plain Boiled Pudding