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Dessert

Suet Pudding

Suet pudding is a boiled sweet pudding made with sugar, raisins, suet, flour, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, mix together the sugar, raisins, suet, flour, baking powder, and salt until well combined.

  2. Transfer the mixture into a cloth bag suitable for boiling.

Boil and make the sauce

  1. Boil the pudding in water for 4 hours.

  2. For the sauce, add the walnut-sized lump of butter, vinegar, salt, flour, and sugar to the water used for boiling the pudding. Stir well and flavor with lemon.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

Suet
Melts during boiling to keep the pudding moist and rich.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the pudding rise and turn light.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Keeping the cloth bag fully submerged while boiling. If the bag rises out of the water, the pudding cooks unevenly and can dry out at the top. Steady, continuous simmering with the bag fully covered keeps heat even across the whole pudding.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, raisin, flour, walnut, butter, vinegar. 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.

More suet pudding recipes

Lemon 28Boiled 19Steamed 12Potato 11Apple 10Raisin 10 See all 649 →

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