Name: Damson Pudding
Ingredients: 1½ pints of damsons; ⅓ cup of moist sugar; ½ lb. of suet or butter crust; ½ lb. of flour

Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Damson Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

1½ pints of damsons
⅓ cup of moist sugar
½ lb. of suet or butter crust
½ lb. of flour

Directions

Make the crust

Make a suet crust with ½ lb. of flour.
Line a buttered pudding basin with a portion of the crust.

Fill and seal

Fill the basin with damsons and sprinkle with sugar.
Cover with a lid and pinch the edges of the crust to seal.
Tie a floured cloth over the top.

Boil

Place the pudding in boiling water and boil for 2½ to 3 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.

Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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

Damsons: Supply the fruit filling and its tart flavour.
Moist sugar: Sweetens the fruit and balances its tartness.
Suet or butter: Adds fat that makes the crust rich and tender.
Flour: Forms the structure of the crust that holds the filling.

The step that matters

Sealing and boiling the pudding. The lid, pinched crust and floured cloth must seal well so steam cannot escape. Steam and boiling water cook the crust through, and the water must stay boiling for the full 2½ to 3 hours to keep the pudding from turning soggy or undercooked.

“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.