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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A steamed rice pudding with suet, raisins, candied peel, eggs, and a sherry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice base

  1. Combine milk and rice in a pot.

  2. Cook for 1 hour or more until rice is tender.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix suet, sugar, candied peel, sultana raisins, and eggs in a bowl.

  2. Combine the rice mixture with the suet mixture. Stir well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding mold.

  4. Steam for 2 ½ hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Whisk together sherry, sugar, egg yolks, and a little lemon juice.

  2. Serve the pudding with the sauce poured over it.

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. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  2. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help the pudding set as it steams.
Suet
Adds richness and fat that gives the pudding a moist, tender crumb.
Rice
Cooked into the milk to add body and a soft, starchy texture.
Sultana raisins
Provide chewy pockets of sweetness through the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as it is whisked, giving it a smooth, rich body.

The step that matters

Steam for 2 ½ hours. Steaming gently and steadily cooks the egg-set pudding through without drying it. Letting the water boil dry or the pot fall off a steady simmer can leave the pudding unevenly cooked or dense.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, rice, sugar, raisin, egg, sherry, sauce):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, sugar, raisin, egg, sherry, sauce. 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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