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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with oats, suet, molasses, sweet milk, raisins, currants, nuts, flour, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix sugar and suet together in a large bowl.

  2. Add molasses and sweet milk, then mix in the dry ingredients.

  3. Sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.

  4. Sprinkle the chopped fruit with a little flour to prevent sticking.

  5. Fold in the fruit and nuts into the mixture.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam the pudding for four hours.

  2. Serve with caramel or hard 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  4. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Oats + nutstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding a moist, tender crumb.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during steaming.
Molasses
Adds dark color, moisture, and a deep, slightly bitter sweetness.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to help the pudding rise and lighten.
Quaker oats
Add body and a chewy texture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Dusting the chopped fruit with flour before folding it in. Flour coats the fruit so it is less likely to sink to the bottom and stick together, keeping the pieces spread evenly through the batter.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, oats, molasses, milk, raisin, nuts, 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 fruit pudding recipes

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