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Dessert

Fat or Marrow Pudding

A pudding made with eggs, sugar, flour, raisins, suet, and fat or marrow, boiled for five hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Fat or Marrow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Break the eggs into a bowl and beat them with sugar and flour until smooth.

  2. Add the raisins and suet, mixing well.

Fill and boil

  1. Grease a pudding mold with butter.

  2. Pour the mixture into the mold and cover tightly with a cloth.

  3. Boil for 5 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and give the pudding its structure as they set with heat.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it holds together instead of running apart.
Suet
Adds fat that makes the pudding rich and tender as it cooks.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pieces throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the richness of the suet.

The step that matters

Cover the mold tightly before boiling. A loose cover lets boiling water seep into the mold, making the pudding soggy and diluting its flavor. A snug seal keeps the steam inside, so the pudding cooks gently and evenly over the long boil.

“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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