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Dessert

Suet Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, raisins, sorghum, sour milk, currants, baking soda, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. Mix the chopped suet, raisins, and sorghum in a bowl until well combined.

  2. Add the sour milk to the mixture.

  3. Mix the baking soda with some flour in a separate cup.

  4. Stir the mixture into the batter until it foams.

  5. Gradually add enough flour to achieve a stiff cake batter consistency.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into a pan with a tube in the center.

  2. Place the pan in a steamer.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + sorghumtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sorghum + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Raisin + molassestop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 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
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
Sorghum
Adds sweetness, moisture, and a deep molasses flavor to the batter.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda and adds tang to the pudding.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the stiff batter together while it steams.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture into the batter until it foams. The baking soda must be combined quickly so it reacts with the sour milk's acid and releases gas. Once the foaming starts, the batter needs to be steamed promptly to trap that gas and give the pudding its lift.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, sorghum, molasses, milk, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sorghum, molasses, milk, flour. 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

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