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A Suet or Plain Pudding

A suet pudding made by mixing suet, flour, eggs, milk, and optional spices, then boiled in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,759 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

A Suet or Plain Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine the chopped suet and flour.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, salt, and enough milk to achieve a proper consistency.

  3. If making dumplings, divide the mixture into 6-8 portions.

Boil

  1. Boil the pudding in a cloth for 4 hours or until cooked through.

  2. Boil dumplings for about 2 hours.

  3. For a plain pudding, omit milk and eggs, using only water instead.

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. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Beef suet
Provides fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Forms the bulk of the dough and gives the pudding its structure.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as they set during cooking.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and adds richness and softness to the dough.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding in a cloth for 4 hours or until cooked through. Boiling at a steady simmer cooks the dough evenly and sets its structure, while uneven heat or a loosely tied cloth can leave the centre underdone or waterlogged.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, egg, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, egg, 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.

More suet pudding recipes

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