Skip to main content
Dessert

College Pudding

A sweet pudding made with suet, bread crumbs, currants, sugar, mixed spice, eggs, brandy, lemon, rolled in flour and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

College Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Combine suet, bread crumbs, currants, sugar, and mixed spice in a bowl.

  2. Moisten the mixture with beaten eggs, brandy, and grated lemon.

Shape and fry

  1. Form the mixture into balls the size of an apple.

  2. Brush the balls with egg, roll in flour, and fry in butter until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with wine 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Adds fat that keeps the mixture moist and rich as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorbs liquid and gives the balls a soft, binding body.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and add structure to the balls.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the outside brown when fried.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy fruit texture throughout.

The step that matters

Frying in butter until golden brown. Butter browns through the milk solids and sugars on the surface, creating flavour and colour. Too much heat burns the butter and sugar before the centre warms, while too little leaves the balls pale and greasy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, currant, sugar, egg, brandy, flour, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, currant, sugar, egg, brandy, flour, butter. 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.

More college pudding recipes

New 6 See all 39 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes