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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A boiled pudding made with rice, suet, raisins, candied peel, eggs, and served with 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

Prepare the filling

  1. In a pot, combine milk and rice. Cook for 1 hour or more until rice is tender.

  2. In a bowl, mix suet, sugar, candied peel, sultana raisins, and eggs.

  3. Combine the rice mixture with the suet mixture and pour into a pudding mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam the pudding for 2½ hours.

  2. For the sauce, mix sherry, sugar, egg yolks, and lemon juice. Whisk until frothy.

  3. 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

Rice
Cooked in milk until tender, it thickens the pudding and gives it a soft body.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and give it a smooth, rich texture.
Sultana raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. Steam gently and keep the water topped up. Too little heat or water loss makes the pudding dense or dry, and boiling water can break up the mold's structure.

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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