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A Cheap Suet Pudding

A suet pudding made with flour, boiled potatoes, suet, salt, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

A Cheap Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the flour, grated potatoes, suet, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add enough milk to form a stiff batter.

Boil the pudding

  1. Place the batter in a well-floured cloth and tie it securely.

  2. Boil the pudding for 1 hour.

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. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Flour
Provides the main structure, setting into a firm pudding as it cooks.
Potatoes
Adds starch and moisture, giving a soft, tender crumb.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and potato so the mixture forms a cohesive batter.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth securely. A tight, well-sealed cloth stops boiling water seeping into the pudding, which would make it soggy and cause it to fall apart. Flouring the cloth helps keep the pudding from sticking to it.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Sweet potatofits about as well
  4. Parsnipfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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.

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