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Dessert

Veal-suet Pudding

A baked or boiled pudding made with bread, milk, eggs, currants, veal suet, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Veal-suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread and milk

  1. Cut the bread into slices.

  2. Boil and sweeten the milk, then pour it over the bread slices.

Make the custard and layer

  1. Once soaked, pour out a little milk and mix it with the beaten eggs and grated nutmeg.

  2. Layer the soaked bread in a greased dish, alternating with layers of currants and shredded veal suet.

Bake or boil

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) or boil in a basin if preferred.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, binding the milk and bread into a firm, sliceable pudding.
New milk
Soaks the bread and forms the custard, supplying moisture for a soft, tender texture.
Bread
Absorbs the sweetened milk and gives the pudding its body and crumb.
Veal suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps the layers moist and rich as they cook.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit between the bread layers.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the custard.

The step that matters

Baking the custard layers. The eggs must set gently. Too much heat makes egg custard curdle, weep and turn rubbery, so check that the pudding is just firm rather than overcooked.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, nutmeg, veal, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, nutmeg, veal, butter. 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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