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Dessert

Amherst Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, milk, raisins, and a sweet sauce of sugar, butter, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Amherst Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Combine flour, suet, milk, raisins, salt, spice, and baking soda in a large bowl and mix well.

  2. Pour the mixture into a cloth bag.

  3. Boil the bag in water for 3 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Cream together sugar and butter for the sauce.

  2. Beat in the egg until smooth.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pieces throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps it cream smoothly with the butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce.
Egg
Binds the sauce and helps it turn smooth and cohesive.

The step that matters

Boiling the bag for 3 hours. The pudding cooks by moist heat, so the water must stay at a steady boil for the full 3 hours. A drop in temperature slows cooking and can leave the pudding dense and unevenly set.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, sugar, butter, egg. 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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