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Dessert

Boiled Fruit Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet, flour, farola, fruit, and sweetener, wrapped in pastry and cooked in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Boiled Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pastry

  1. Chop the suet and mix it with the flour, farola, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Moisten the mixture with water to form a stiff paste (about ½ cup of water).

  3. Roll out the pastry and cover a greased pudding basin with it.

Fill and boil

  1. Fill the basin with the chopped fruit and sweeten to taste.

  2. Cover with the trimmings of the pastry.

  3. Tie the basin firmly in a cloth and boil for 2 hours.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Flour + appletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 keeps the pastry rich and tender as it steams.
Flour
Forms the structure of the pastry once it is moistened and cooked.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the pastry rises and lightens.
Fruit
Provides moisture and flavour that softens and sweetens inside the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the basin firmly in a cloth. A loose cloth lets water seep in during boiling, making the pastry soggy. A firm seal keeps steam around the pudding so it cooks evenly.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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