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Boiled Roll Pudding

A boiled pudding made from flour, suet, and fruit, rolled and cooked in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Boiled Roll Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a deep dish, mix the flour, suet, and salt together.

  2. Gradually add cold water until a firm paste forms, mixing quickly with your hands.

  3. Transfer the paste to a well-floured surface and roll it out into an oblong sheet about ½ inch thick.

Fill and roll

  1. Spread the fruit thickly on the paste, leaving an inch around the edges.

  2. Roll the paste up tightly and seal the edges by pressing them together.

  3. Wrap the roll in a well-floured cotton cloth, tying the ends securely.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for 1.5 to 2 hours.

  2. Serve hot with 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Flour + appletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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
Forms the structure of the dough that holds the roll together while it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the paste tender and rich as it cooks.
Cold water
Hydrates the flour so the mixture binds into a firm, workable paste.
Fruit
Provides the filling, adding moisture, sweetness, and flavor inside the roll.

The step that matters

Wrap the roll tightly and seal the edges. A loose wrap or unsealed edges let water into the roll and let the filling leak out during boiling. A well-floured cloth keeps the dough from sticking, and a firm, sealed roll holds its shape and cooks evenly.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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