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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A suet and flour base filled with fruit, boiled for 1.5 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. In a bowl, combine suet, flour, and salt.

  2. Add water gradually to form a stiff paste.

  3. Roll out the paste thinly and line a buttered basin with it.

Fill and cover

  1. Add the fruit mixed with sugar, except for apples.

  2. If using apples, boil them with sugar until softened.

  3. Cover the fruit with a lid of paste.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for 1.5 hours.

  2. For children, serve with stewed fruit alongside.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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
Adds fat that keeps the paste rich and tender as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the paste structure that holds the pudding together while boiling.
Fruit
Provides the main filling, with sweetness and moisture from the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps soften apples when they are boiled.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for 1.5 hours. The paste needs steady, sustained boiling to cook through and set. Letting the water drop too low can leave the crust heavy and the filling undercooked.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter. 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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