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Kidney Pudding

A steamed pudding made from cow's kidney, suet crust, stock, and optional bacon, seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon or vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Kidney Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Roll the suet crust to ½ inch thick and line a well-greased basin with it.

  2. Remove the hard core from the kidney, wash it in vinegar and water, and cut it into nearly 1-inch square pieces.

Fill and cover

  1. Add the optional fat bacon or salt pork for extra flavor. Season generously with salt and pepper.

  2. Pour in enough plain stock to cover the kidney pieces.

  3. Cover with the remaining suet crust and seal the edges.

Cook

  1. Steam or boil for about 1 hour until cooked through.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + porktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cow's kidney
Forms the main meat filling, becoming tender through long moist cooking.
Suet crust
Forms the pastry lining and lid that encase the filling while it steams.
Plain stock
Surrounds the kidney pieces, adding moisture and savoury flavour during cooking.
Fat bacon or salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the filling as it cooks.

The step that matters

Remove the hard core and wash the kidney well. The hard core and strong-tasting parts of kidney can make the pudding bitter and tough. Removing them and soaking the pieces in vinegar and water helps mellow the flavour and keeps the texture pleasant.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, pork, lemon):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, pork, lemon. 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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