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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A suet and flour pudding filled with mixed fruit and sugar, boiled for 1.5 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar 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 ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pastry

  1. Combine suet, flour, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add water gradually to form a stiff paste.

  3. Roll out the paste thinly and line a buttered basin with it.

Fill and boil

  1. Add the fruit mixed with sugar, except for apples.

  2. Boil the apples with sugar.

  3. Cover the basin with a lid of paste and boil the pudding for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Stew a little fruit.

  2. Serve the stewed fruit alongside the pudding.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Flour + appletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 paste tender and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the structure of the paste that holds the pudding together.
Fruit
Provides the main flavour and moisture inside the pudding.

The step that matters

Covering the basin with the paste lid. The lid must seal the edges so steam stays inside while the pudding boils. A loose seal lets water in and dilutes the filling, and the pastry may become soggy.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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