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Dessert

To Make a Dandy Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, currants, suet, treacle, nutmeg, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Make a Dandy Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix and shape

  1. In a large bowl, mix the flour, currants, suet, treacle, and nutmeg together.

  2. Gradually add milk until the mixture is well combined.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a pudding cloth or mold.

Boil

  1. Boil for 4 hours in a pot of water.

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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Currant + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Flour and milk 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it hydrates and cooks.
Suet
Solid fat that melts during cooking, keeping the pudding moist and tender.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, dark color, and moisture with a rich, molasses-like flavor.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of dried fruit throughout the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the dry ingredients into a cohesive mixture.

The step that matters

Adding the milk gradually. Flour absorbs liquid as it hydrates, so adding milk slowly lets you stop once the mixture is combined. Too much liquid at once makes the batter slack, and the pudding can turn soggy and hold together poorly.

Swap the currant

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

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

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