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Dessert

A Christmas Pudding

A traditional British Christmas pudding made with suet, flour, dried fruit, spices, and eggs, boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

A Christmas Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine the suet, flour, raisins, currants, bread crumbs, sugar, lemon peel, mace, nutmeg, and ginger.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a pudding cloth or mold.

Cook

  1. Boil for five 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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 add structure as they set during cooking.
Flour
Provides the body that holds the pudding together when cooked.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and lighten the texture of the dense mixture.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for five hours. Long, steady boiling cooks the eggs and starches through and keeps the pudding moist. If the water boils dry or drops to a low simmer, the pudding can turn heavy or unevenly cooked, so the pot needs topping up with boiling water.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, raisin, currant, bread, sugar, lemon, nutmeg. 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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