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Dessert

Currant Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet, bread crumbs or flour, currants, spices, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a large bowl, combine the minced suet, bread crumbs or flour, currants, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Add enough milk to moisten the mixture thoroughly, then mix all ingredients well and tie them in a cloth.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the pudding in water for 3 hours.

  2. Serve with caudle or a simple sweet 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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Currant + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Minced suet
Adds richness and fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Bread crumbs or flour
Provides the body that holds the pudding together while it boils.
Currants
Add fruit sweetness and chewy bursts of flavour throughout the pudding.
Milk
Moistens the dry ingredients so they bind into a cohesive mixture.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth. The cloth must be tied firmly but with room for the pudding to swell; if it is too tight the pudding may burst, and if too loose water can seep in and make it soggy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, cinnamon, nutmeg, 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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