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Dessert

Boiled Suet Pudding

A steamed or boiled pudding made from sour milk, graham flour, white flour, powdered suet, baking soda, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,759 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Boiled Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix sour milk and flours in a bowl to form a batter.

  2. Stir in powdered suet.

  3. Dissolve baking soda in boiling water, then add to batter, mixing well.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour batter into a floured bag or oiled mold with a tight cover, leaving room to swell.

  2. Boil for 1.5 hours without stopping.

  3. Alternatively, pour batter into an oiled basin, cover with an inverted pie pan, and steam for 2 hours, keeping water at a fast boil.

  4. Serve immediately with lemon sauce or cream and sugar.

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. Milk + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Sour milk or buttermilk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Graham flour
Provides the structure and a coarse, nutty texture in the batter.
White flour
Adds gluten-based structure so the pudding holds its shape when cooked.
Beef suet
Adds fat that makes the pudding rich and moist as it cooks.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic milk to release carbon dioxide, causing the pudding to rise.

The step that matters

Leave room in the container for the pudding to swell. The batter rises as the baking soda reacts with the acidic milk and the heat expands the gas. A tightly filled bag or mold can burst or squeeze the pudding out of shape, so space must be left for expansion.

“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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