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Dessert

Baroness Pudding

A suet and flour pudding with raisins, baked in milk and baking soda, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Baroness Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, suet, and salt together gradually.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk and add it to the mixture.

  3. Fold in the raisins and beat the batter until very light.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a mold and boil for 4½ hours.

  2. Serve hot with any kind of 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that give the pudding its body and structure.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.
Milk
Moistens the flour so it forms a batter and adds richness.
Baking soda
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Beat the batter until very light. Beating traps air in the batter, which lightens the texture and helps it rise. Overbeating after the flour is mixed in can develop too much gluten, making the pudding dense and tough.

“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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