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Dessert

Cherry-and-currant Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, cherries, currants, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry-and-currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour and salt.

  2. Chop the suet and add it to the flour.

  3. Pour in the cold water and mix to form a dough quickly.

  4. Roll the dough out to ½ inch thick.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Butter a quart bowl and line it with the dough, leaving an inch above the rim.

  2. From the trimmings, roll out a top crust for the pudding.

  3. Fill the bowl with the cherries and currants, sprinkling sugar between layers.

  4. Cover with the top crust, tie a cloth over the bowl, and boil for 2 hours.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Flour
Forms the dough structure that holds the pudding together while it cooks.
Beef-kidney suet
Adds richness and a tender, flaky texture to the crust.
Cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour and juicy moisture inside the pudding.
Currants
Add tart, concentrated fruit flavour and chewy texture to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and balances the tartness of the currants.

The step that matters

Mix the dough quickly. Overworking a suet dough develops gluten and makes the crust tough, so the water should be added and the dough brought together briefly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, sugar, 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.

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