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Dessert

Raisin Pudding

A baked pudding made with raisins boiled in water, sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, butter, and optional currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raisin Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Boil the raisins in water until soft.

  2. Add sugar to the boiling raisins.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Cut in butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

Cook and finish

  1. Drop small pieces of the dough into the boiling fruit.

  2. If desired, add currant jelly for richness.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Raisins
Provide the bulk of the pudding and soften in boiling water to form the fruit base.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough dumplings as they set in the hot liquid.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the dumplings rise and become light.
Butter
Cut into the flour to add fat, tenderizing the dough for a crumbly texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the boiling fruit, balancing the tartness of the raisins.

The step that matters

Drop small pieces of the dough into the boiling fruit. The fruit must be actively boiling when the dough goes in, so the dumplings set on the surface and cook through. Adding dough to a weak simmer can make them dense and gummy.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, sugar, flour, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, flour, butter. 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 raisin pudding recipes

Steamed 49Baked 27Molasses 21Boiled 9Orange 6Apple 5 See all 88 →

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