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Hunter Pudding

A suet pudding with raisins, currants or sultanas, brown sugar, and flour, boiled for an hour.

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 ↓

Hunter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cloth

  1. Boil a saucepan of water.

  2. Dip the middle of a pudding cloth in the boiling water.

  3. Flour the cloth.

  4. Have a string ready.

Make the mixture

  1. In a basin, mix the flour, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Finely chop the suet. Remove the skin from the suet.

  3. Stone the raisins. Wash the currants. Dry the currants. Clean the sultanas.

  4. Add the suet, sugar, and fruit to the flour mixture. Mix well.

  5. Form a light, firm paste with the water.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the mixture in the cloth.

  2. Tie it tightly in a ball shape, leaving room for it to swell.

  3. Boil in the water for 1 hour.

  4. Remove from the water. Untie the string.

  5. Turn it onto a hot dish to serve.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives it structure as it sets.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist during boiling.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the pudding rise and swell.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses flavour to the pudding.
Raisins, currants, or sultanas
Add sweetness, chewy texture, and moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth loosely enough for expansion. The pudding swells as the baking powder releases gas and the flour sets. Tying it too tightly leaves no room to expand, which can crush the texture or split the cloth.

“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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