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Dessert

Currant Suet Pudding

A suet pudding made with currants, flour, sugar, and spices, boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Currant Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl.

  2. Add enough water to form a stiff mixture, about 3 cups.

  3. Boil in a greased basin for 3 hours or in a cloth for slightly less time.

Optional additions

  1. For a richer pudding, add 1 ounce more currants, 2 ounces more suet, and some candied peel.

  2. An egg can be added for improvement.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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
Fat that melts during boiling, keeping the pudding moist and tender.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding once bound with water.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the pudding rises and becomes lighter.
Currants
Add small pockets of sweetness and fruit flavour throughout the pudding.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses note to the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil in a greased basin for 3 hours or in a cloth for slightly less time.. The pudding must cook long and at a steady simmer so the suet melts fully and the flour sets. Greasing the basin keeps the pudding from sticking when turned out.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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