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Dessert

Baroness Pudding

A suet and raisin pudding boiled in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Baroness Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the suet finely.

  2. Stone the raisins and cut them into halves.

  3. Mix the suet, raisins, salt, and flour in a bowl.

  4. Moisten the mixture with milk and stir well.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie the pudding in a floured cloth that has been wrung out in boiling water.

  2. Place the pudding in a saucepan of boiling water and let it boil for 3 hours.

  3. Serve with plain sifted 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 melts during boiling, keeping the pudding rich and moist.
Flour
Provides starch that gives the pudding its body and holds it together.
Milk
Moistens the dry mixture so it binds into a soft, cohesive pudding.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the pudding in a floured cloth. The cloth must be wrung out well so it is damp, not dripping, and the flour coating keeps the surface from sticking. A loose or wet tie lets water soak into the pudding and make it heavy.

“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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