Skip to main content
Dessert

Rhubarb Pudding, Boiled

A boiled pudding made with rhubarb, suet, flour, and sugar, served with cream and sifted sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rhubarb and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 670 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Rhubarb Pudding, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a suet crust by mixing ½ cup of suet with 1 cup of flour.

  2. Grease a basin and line it with the suet crust.

  3. Wash and wipe the rhubarb, then peel if old and cut into 1‑inch lengths.

Assemble and boil

  1. Fill the basin with rhubarb and add the sugar, then cover with the remaining crust.

  2. Pinch the edges of the pudding together and tie a floured cloth over it.

  3. Place the pudding in boiling water and boil for 2 to 2½ hours.

Serve

  1. Turn the pudding out of the basin and serve with cream and sifted sugar.

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. Rhubarb + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together670 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

Rhubarb
Supplies the tart flavour and moisture that fills the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and rich as it steams.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the crust that holds the filling.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharpness of the rhubarb.

The step that matters

Sealing the pudding before boiling. Pinching the edges and tying the floured cloth closed keeps boiling water out of the filling. A tight seal lets the crust steam evenly and stops the pudding from becoming waterlogged.

Swap the rhubarb

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Rhubarbthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, cream. 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 rhubarb pudding recipes

Boiled 5 See all 56 →

You might also like

Rhubarb PieRhubarb Pie152 recipesRhubarb MarmaladeRhubarb Marmalade35 recipesRhubarb JellyRhubarb Jelly28 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes