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Dessert

Black or Red-currant Pudding

A boiled currant pudding made with suet or butter crust, sugar, flour, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Black or Red-currant Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Make a suet or butter crust using ½ lb flour.

  2. Butter a basin and line it with part of the crust.

Fill and boil

  1. Add the currants and sprinkle the sugar over them.

  2. Cover the pudding with the remaining crust and secure the edges tightly.

  3. Tie it down with a floured cloth and place it in boiling water.

  4. Boil for 2 to 3 hours.

  5. If boiled without a basin, reduce time by 1 hour.

Finish

  1. For a crisp surface, brown the crust in a very hot oven for a few minutes before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Black currant + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Red or black currants
Provide the main fruit flavour, tartness and juice that soaks into the pudding.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and helps draw out the currant juice into a syrup.
Flour
Forms the structure of the crust that holds the pudding together.
Suet or butter
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and rich.

The step that matters

Securing the edges and cloth. Sealing the crust edges tightly and tying the cloth firmly keeps boiling water out of the pudding, so the currants cook in steam and juice without becoming waterlogged and the crust keeps its shape.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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.

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