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Veal-Suet Pudding

A baked or boiled pudding made with soaked bread, milk, eggs, sugar, currants, and shredded veal suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Veal-Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Slice the soft part of the bread and boil it in milk sweetened with sugar.

  2. Mix a little milk with the beaten eggs and nutmeg.

Assemble and cook

  1. Layer the soaked bread, egg mixture, currants, and shredded suet in a buttered dish.

  2. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven or boil in a basin until set.

Serve

  1. Serve warm.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and bind the layers together as the pudding cooks.
Veal suet
Adds richness and fat, keeping the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Bread
Soaks up the sweetened milk and forms the soft body of the pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid that soaks the bread and sets with the eggs into a custard.
Currants
Add sweetness and pockets of chewy fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Bake or boil until set. Egg-based custards set as their proteins coagulate with heat. Stopping too early leaves the pudding runny, while overcooking makes it tough and grainy.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, veal, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, veal, 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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