Name: Cherry Pudding
Ingredients: butter or suet; flour; picked cherries

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Pudding

Ingredients

butter or suet
flour
picked cherries

Directions

Prepare the basin

Butter a basin well.

Make the pudding

Make a paste by rubbing butter or chopped suet into flour.
Line the basin with the paste.
Add picked cherries on top.
Cover with a crust made from the paste.

Cook

Boil the pudding in the basin.
Alternatively, boil in a cloth without a basin.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter or suet: Rubbed into flour to make a short paste that gives the pudding its tender, crumbly texture.
Flour: Forms the paste that lines and covers the cherries, providing the pudding's structure.
Picked cherries: Provide the fruit filling and moisture inside the pudding.

“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.