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Dessert

Half-pound Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet, bread crumbs, flour, currants, raisins, treacle or brown sugar, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Half-pound Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix all ingredients together, grease a basin and pour the mixture in.

Boil

  1. Boil for 4 to 5 hours.

Variations

  1. For variations, omit suet and add ¼ pound dripping and beef marrow, or use 4 ounces of mashed potatoes and 4 ounces of boiled carrots, reducing flour and bread accordingly.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 keeps the pudding rich and moist as it cooks.
Flour
Provides structure so the mixture holds together when set by heat.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a light, tender crumb.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Treacle or brown sugar
Adds sweetness, moisture and a deep caramel colour and flavour.
Milk
Moistens the dry ingredients so they bind into a workable mixture.

The step that matters

Boil for the full 4 to 5 hours. Sustained gentle heat is needed for the starch and fat mixture to set and cook through. Stopping early leaves the centre dense, wet and under-cooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

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