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Dessert

Suet Pudding

A steamed suet pudding made with sour milk, molasses, flour, spices, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix and sift flour, salt, and spices together.

  2. Stir baking soda into a little boiling water and add enough sour milk to make 1 cup.

  3. Mix the sour milk, molasses, and suet together, then add to the flour mixture.

  4. Flour the raisins and mix them in well.

Steam

  1. Put the mixture into buttered molds or baking powder cans.

  2. Place the molds in a kettle, allowing water to come almost to the top of the cans.

  3. Boil for 15 minutes, then place in a cooker for 4 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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure that holds the dense pudding together as it steams.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during long steaming.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture, and the dark color and rich flavor of the pudding.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda and adds moisture to the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Raisins
Add pockets of chewy sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep the water level up during steaming. The pudding cooks gently by steam from the surrounding water. If the water drops well below the top of the molds or boils away, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn out dry or heavy.

“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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