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Dessert

Boiled Currant Pudding.

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, currants, and milk, served with lemon, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Currant Pudding.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the currants, removing any stalks or grit.

  2. Chop the suet finely.

Make and boil

  1. Mix all ingredients together and moisten with enough milk to form a stiff batter.

  2. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth.

  3. Boil in water for 3½ hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a cut lemon, cold butter, and sifted sugar.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding as the batter sets during boiling.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender as it cooks.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit flavour throughout the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the mixture forms a stiff, cohesive batter.

The step that matters

Boil in water for 3½ hours. The long boil cooks the flour fully and softens the suet, so the pudding turns tender rather than heavy. Keeping the cloth-wrapped pudding submerged throughout is what allows even cooking.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk. 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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