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Dessert

Soger's Christmas Pudding

A traditional British Christmas pudding made with raisins, currants, suet, sugar, flour, eggs, breadcrumbs, rum, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Soger's Christmas Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the raisins and wash the currants.

  2. Chop the beef suet finely.

  3. Mix the ingredients the night before.

  4. In a bowl, mix the raisins, currants, suet, brown sugar, flour, eggs, bread crumbs, rum, and milk.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the mixture in a cloth and boil for 3 hours.

  2. Serve with melted butter mixed with sugar and lemon juice.

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

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

  3. Currant + rumtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together155 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the pudding its set structure.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and add body, giving the pudding a soft, cohesive texture.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy moisture to the pudding.
Flour
Provides starch that helps hold the pudding together.

The step that matters

Place the mixture in a cloth and boil for 3 hours. The cloth must be tightly tied and the pudding kept fully submerged while boiling; if water gets in or the level drops, the pudding turns soggy and cooks unevenly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, beef, sugar, flour, egg, bread, rum):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, beef, sugar, flour, egg, bread, rum. 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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