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Dessert

Veal-Suet Pudding

A sweet pudding made with bread, milk, eggs, nutmeg, currants, and shredded veal suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Veal-Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the custard

  1. Boil the milk and sweeten it with sugar.

  2. Pour the sweetened milk over the bread slices and let them soak.

  3. In a bowl, mix a little of the soaked milk with the beaten eggs and grated nutmeg.

Combine and cook

  1. Combine this mixture with the soaked bread, currants, and shredded veal suet.

  2. Bake in a buttered dish at 400°F (200°C) or boil in a basin until set.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the pudding into a firm, sliceable custard as they cook.
Bread
Soaks up the sweetened milk to give the pudding body and a soft crumb.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs set into a custard.
Veal suet
Adds richness and fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chew throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Bake or boil until set. Eggs set into a custard only within a range of temperatures; cooking too hot or too long makes them curdle and turn grainy and watery, while stopping too early leaves the pudding runny.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, veal, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, veal, 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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