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Dessert

Hunt Pudding

A steamed suet pudding flavored with ginger and raspberry jam, sweetened with sugar and baked with baking soda and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raspberry and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,014 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hunt Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Shred and chop the suet.

  2. Mix the suet with the flour and add all the dry ingredients.

  3. Stir in the raspberry jam and mix well.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in a little sour milk or buttermilk and stir it into the mixture to form a stiff batter.

Steam

  1. Steam for three hours.

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. Raspberry + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,014 recipes

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

  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. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Ginger + raspberrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together125 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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 structure of the pudding once mixed with liquid and suet.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during long steaming.
Raspberry jam
Provides sweetness, fruit flavor, and moisture throughout the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk or buttermilk to produce gas that lightens the batter.

The step that matters

Stir in the baking soda with the sour milk or buttermilk. Baking soda needs an acid to react and release gas. Dissolving it in sour milk or buttermilk lets it rise evenly, and a stiff batter holds the bubbles in place during steaming.

Swap the raspberry

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, ginger, 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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