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Dessert

Plain Raisin Pudding

A simple pudding made with flour, raisins, sugar, and water, boiled for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Plain Raisin Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, raisins, and sugar.

  2. Add enough water to form a moist pudding.

  3. Grease a basin and pour the mixture into it.

Boil

  1. Tie the basin in a cloth and boil for 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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Millennium flour
Forms the bulk and structure of the pudding as it cooks.
Borwick's baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the pudding rises and turns light.
Stoned raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture and moisture to the pudding.
Demerara sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly.

The step that matters

Tie the basin in a cloth and boil for 2 hours. The cloth must be tied snugly so the pudding stays sealed, and the water must keep simmering for the full time. Boiling steam cooks the batter gently and evenly, so if the water drops off or the basin is loose, the pudding can turn out soggy or unevenly set.

“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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