Skip to main content
Dessert

A Metrical Recipe for a Christmas Pudding

A traditional British dessert made with eggs, suet, dried fruit, flour, and sugar, steamed or boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Metrical Recipe for a Christmas Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Separate the yolks and whites of the eggs and beat them until well combined.

  2. Chop the suet finely and mix it with the raisins, currants, sugar, flour, and candied peel.

  3. Let the mixture sit for 15 minutes.

Cook

  1. Tie the mixture in a cloth and place it in a pot of water.

  2. Boil for 1 hour for every pound of pudding weight.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as the pudding sets.
Suet
Adds fat and richness, keeping the pudding moist as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch that gives the pudding its body.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture.
Dried currants
Add concentrated fruit flavour and chewy texture.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the batter.

The step that matters

Tie the mixture in a cloth. The cloth must be tied loosely enough for the pudding to swell as the flour and eggs set during boiling. Tying it too tightly can compress the pudding and make it dense.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, raisin, sugar, flour. 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.

More christmas pudding recipes

Sauce 4Cottage 4Apple 3 See all 175 →

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes