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New College Pudding

A suet pudding with currants, bread, biscuit, nutmeg, candied orange peel, eggs, fried and served with pounded loaf sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 368 recipes. Both carry maltol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

New College Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Mix the minced suet, currants, grated bread, pounded sweet biscuit, salt, grated nutmeg, and minced candied orange peel in a bowl. Add the beaten eggs and combine well.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Fry the mixture until light brown, shaking the pan and turning frequently until cooked through.

  3. Serve with pounded loaf sugar sprinkled thickly over the top.

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. Biscuit + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together368 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Bread + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together319 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh beef suet
Melts during frying, adding richness and moisture to the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the dry ingredients together and help set the mixture as it cooks.
Grated bread
Adds body and absorbs moisture, giving the mixture structure.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Pounded sweet biscuit
Adds sweetness and a crumbly texture to the mixture.

The step that matters

Frying until cooked through. The mixture is cooked in a pan rather than baked, so the heat must penetrate the whole pudding while the outside browns. Frying too hot browns the surface before the eggs set, leaving the centre raw. Frequent turning and shaking distribute heat evenly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, bread, biscuit, nutmeg, orange, egg, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, biscuit, nutmeg, orange, egg, 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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