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Dessert

Boiled Boston Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, sugar, suet, raisins, currants, citron, yeast, and milk or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Boiled Boston Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sift the flour and add the quick yeast.

  2. Use some of the flour to dry the fruit.

  3. Mix enough milk or water with the flour to form a batter.

  4. Dip a cloth in hot water, then flour it.

Cook

  1. Place the pudding mixture in the cloth and tie it closely.

  2. Boil constantly for three hours, ensuring the water is boiling when you add the pudding.

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

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

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the batter and the body of the pudding.
Suet
Adds richness and a moist, tender texture as it melts.
Quick yeast
Makes the pudding mixture rise and lighten.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavour.
Raisins
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy texture.
Currants
Add tart sweetness and chewy texture through the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling when adding the pudding. Dropping the pudding into water that is not fully boiling slows the early cooking and can leave it heavy. Maintaining a constant boil cooks the outside quickly so it sets and holds its shape while the inside cooks through.

Swap the currant

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

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

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