Name: English Roll Pudding
Ingredients: ½ cup suet, finely chopped; 2 cups all-purpose flour; water as needed; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; preserves of your choice (damsons, currants, berries, etc.)

Why it works: Flour and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,077 recipes. The science ↓

English Roll Pudding

Ingredients

½ cup suet, finely chopped
2 cups all-purpose flour
water as needed
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt
preserves of your choice (damsons, currants, berries, etc.)

Directions

Make the dough

In a bowl, mix suet, flour, water, and salt to form a dough.
Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick.

Fill and wrap

Spread your chosen preserves over the dough.
Dust with a little flour, then roll it up tightly.
Wet the ends and pinch them to seal.
Wrap the roll in a wet, floured cloth.

Cook and serve

Boil or steam for 1 to 2 hours, depending on size.
Serve hot with a rich liquid 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 + curranttop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,077 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Suet: Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and moist as it cooks.
All-purpose flour: Provides the structure that holds the dough together around the filling.
Preserves: Add sweetness and fruity moisture that soak into the roll as it cooks.

The step that matters

Wrap the roll in a wet, floured cloth. The cloth must be wet and floured so it does not stick to the dough and the roll keeps its shape. Sealing the ends well also stops the filling from leaking into the water while it cooks.

“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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English Roll Pudding