Skip to main content
Dessert

Lowell Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, beef suet, sweet milk, sugar, salt, and baking soda, served with jam or lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,759 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Lowell Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour and chopped suet together.

  2. Add the milk and sugar to the mixture and stir well.

  3. Smooth the baking soda on a plate, then add it along with the salt to the mixture and stir thoroughly.

  4. Pour the batter into a greased mold, ensuring not to disturb any raisins if used.

Boil and serve

  1. Cover the mold with greased paper and place it in a saucepan of boiling water.

  2. Boil the pudding for 1½ hours.

  3. Turn the pudding out onto a hot platter and serve with jam or lemon sauce.

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. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure as its starch and proteins set during boiling.
Beef suet
Solid fat that melts during cooking, keeping the pudding rich and moist.
Sweet milk
Supplies the liquid that hydrates the flour and forms the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding tender.

The step that matters

Cover the mold with greased paper and place it in a saucepan of boiling water.. The greased paper keeps the batter from sticking and lets the pudding expand as it steams. The mold must stay sealed and the water must keep boiling, because water entering the mold makes the pudding soggy and uneven.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes