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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, molasses, sweet milk, flour, raisins, spices, and served with a butter, sugar, egg, sherry, and whipped cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine suet, molasses, sweet milk, flour, raisins, cream of tartar, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Mix well and pour the batter into a greased pudding mold.

  2. Steam the pudding for three hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, melt the butter and sugar together in a saucepan. Remove from heat and beat in the egg until well combined. Stir in the sherry and fold in the whipped cream just before serving.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds richness and a tender, moist crumb as it melts during steaming.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the batter as it sets.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and moisture to the pudding.
Cream of tartar
Acts with baking soda to produce gas that helps the pudding rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar and molasses to lighten the batter.
Egg
Binds the sauce and helps it thicken slightly when beaten in off the heat.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding for three hours. Steam must stay steady and the mold must be sealed so the pudding cooks evenly and does not dry out. Too little water or heat leaves the center dense and underdone.

“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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