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Currant Pudding Hard Dumpling

A sweet pudding made with suet, eggs, milk, flour, currants, raisins, candied peel, spices, and rum or brandy, baked or boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Currant Pudding Hard Dumpling

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.

Make the batter

  1. Melt the suet in a pan.

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the sweet milk.

  3. Pour the egg and milk mixture into the pan with the melted suet and flour, and beat well with a wooden spoon.

  4. Stir in the currants, raisins, candied orange and lemon peel, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and salt.

  5. Add the rum or brandy and mix thoroughly.

Cook and serve

  1. To bake, butter a tin or basin, pour in the pudding, and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1.5 to 2 hours.

  2. To boil, pour the mixture into a cloth, tie it securely, and boil for 6 hours.

  3. Serve with caudle 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Orange + cinnamontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during cooking.
Flour
Provides the body and structure that holds the dense pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist as it cooks.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Rum or brandy
Adds aroma and flavour that deepens the spiced fruit profile.

The step that matters

Securing the cloth or tin before cooking. A loose cloth lets water into the boiling pudding, making it soggy, while an unbuttered tin can make it stick. Tying firmly and buttering the tin keeps the pudding moist and intact during long cooking.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, flour, raisin, orange, lemon, cinnamon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, flour, raisin, orange, lemon, cinnamon. 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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