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Dessert

To Make a Dandy Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, currants, suet, treacle, nutmeg, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Make a Dandy Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the flour, currants, suet, treacle, and nutmeg together in a bowl.

  2. Add enough milk to form a batter.

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

Cook

  1. Boil for 4 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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Currant + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it sets.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist as it steams.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, dark colour and a moist, sticky texture.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the mixture into a batter.

The step that matters

Boil for 4 hours. The long, steady boil cooks the dense suet batter through and sets it into a moist, steamed pudding. A shorter boil leaves the centre heavy and undercooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, nutmeg, 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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