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Dessert

Currant Pudding, Boiled

A boiled pudding made with currants, suet, flour, and sugar, served with lemon, butter, and extra sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Currant Pudding, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the currants, suet, flour, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Add enough milk to form a stiff batter.

  3. Turn the mixture into a floured cloth and tie it securely.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil gently for 2.5 hours.

  2. Serve with a cut lemon, fresh butter, and additional 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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the batter together while boiling.
Currants
Add sweetness, chewy texture, and fruity flavor throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding a tender, browned flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor when served fresh on the warm pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth securely. A loose cloth lets water seep into the batter during long boiling, making the pudding soggy and waterlogged instead of set and moist.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, lemon, butter, sugar. 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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