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Dessert

Suet Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, flour, cinnamon, molasses or sugar, sour milk, baking soda, raisins, and currants.

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 ↓

Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the chopped suet with the flour and cinnamon.

  2. If using sugar, add it to the flour mixture. If using molasses, mix it with the sour milk, then add the baking soda to the sour milk mixture.

  3. Combine the wet and dry ingredients thoroughly.

  4. Fold in the raisins and currants.

Steam

  1. Steam the pudding for at least 2 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.

  1. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 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. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Sour milk
Its acidity activates the baking soda and adds moisture to the batter.
Molasses or sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper flavour, and helps keep the pudding moist.

The step that matters

Steam the pudding for at least 2 hours. Steaming cooks the batter gently and evenly with moist heat. If it is steamed for less time, the centre can stay dense and underset.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, cinnamon, molasses, milk, raisin. 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 suet pudding recipes

Lemon 28Boiled 19Steamed 12Potato 11Apple 10Raisin 10 See all 649 →

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