Name: Damson Pudding
Ingredients: 1 pound damsons; ½ pound moist sugar; ½ pound suet crust (made with 1 pound flour)

Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Damson Pudding

Ingredients

1 pound damsons
½ pound moist sugar
½ pound suet crust (made with 1 pound flour)

Directions

Prepare

Make a suet crust using 1 pound of flour.
Line a buttered pudding basin with a portion of the crust.

Fill and seal

Fill the basin with damsons and sweeten them.
Cover with the lid and pinch the edges of the crust together.
Tie a floured cloth over the pudding.

Boil

Place the pudding in boiling water and boil for 2 to 3 hours.

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.

Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Damsons: Provide the fruit filling and tart flavour that the sugar balances.
Moist sugar: Sweetens the damsons and helps balance their natural tartness.
Suet crust: Forms the pastry casing that holds the filling and absorbs the cooking juices.

“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.