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Dessert

Baroness Pudding

A suet pudding made with suet or dripping, flour, pudding plums, sultanas, and milk, boiled for 4½ hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and milk work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 406 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Baroness Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the suet or dripping, flour, pudding plums, and sultanas in a bowl.

  2. Stir in the milk until well mixed.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding cloth or mold.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil for 4½ hours, ensuring it is fully submerged in water.

  2. Serve warm.

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. Plum + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together406 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + plumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together777 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

Suet or dripping
Fat that melts during long cooking, keeping the pudding tender and rich.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Milk
Moistens the flour and binds the mixture into a cohesive batter.
Sultanas
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep the pudding fully submerged while boiling. Water transfers heat evenly around the pudding. If any part is exposed, it dries out and cooks unevenly, so the water must stay above it for the full 4½ hours.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Plumthe 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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