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Dessert

Suet Pudding

A suet pudding made with molasses, raisins, currants, flour, sour milk, and baking soda, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine suet or butter, molasses, raisins, currants, flour, sour milk, and baking soda, and mix until well combined.

  2. Grease a pudding bag and fill it with the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil in a pot of boiling water for 4 hours.

  2. Serve with 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Suet or butter
Adds fat that enriches the crumb and keeps the pudding moist during steaming.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together as it sets.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark colour and a moist, rich texture.
Sour milk
Provides acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lift the pudding.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that leavens the batter.
Raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and moisture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep the pudding boiling for the full time. Steaming in a sealed bag needs steady, continuous heat to cook the flour and set the batter through. If the water drops below a simmer, the pudding cooks unevenly and may turn out dense or gummy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, molasses, raisin, flour, 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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