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Dessert

Suet Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet or butter, molasses, sugar, sour milk, baking soda, egg, bread, raisins, currants, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine chopped suet or butter, molasses, sugar, sour milk, baking soda, beaten egg, crumbled bread, raisins, currants, and salt.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour until desired consistency.

  3. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for three hours.

  2. Serve with wine or lemon 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.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 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

Suet or butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the pudding a moist, tender crumb.
Molasses
Adds dark sweetness and moisture, and deep flavour to the pudding.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to help the pudding rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk and molasses to produce gas, lightening the texture.
Egg
Binds the ingredients together and helps set the pudding's structure.
Flour
Thickens the batter to the desired consistency and gives it body.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with flour. Flour thickens the batter to the desired consistency; too little leaves it loose and too much makes the pudding dense and heavy once steamed.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, molasses, sugar, milk, egg, bread, raisin):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, molasses, sugar, milk, egg, bread, raisin. 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.

More suet pudding recipes

Lemon 28Boiled 19Steamed 12Potato 11Apple 10Raisin 10 See all 649 →

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