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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A boiled pudding made with rice, suet, sugar, candied peel, raisins, 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

Make the filling

  1. Combine milk and rice in a pot.

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

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

  4. Combine the rice mixture with the suet mixture and stir the combined mixture well.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding cloth or mold and tie the pudding cloth or mold securely.

  2. Boil the pudding for 2 ½ hours.

  3. Whisk together sherry, sugar, egg yolks, and a little lemon juice to make the sauce.

  4. 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 until tender, it thickens the milk and gives the pudding a soft body.
Suet
Adds fat that makes the pudding rich and moist as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and help it thicken smoothly.
Sultana raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Cooking the rice in milk. The rice must be fully tender before it is combined with the other ingredients, because rice added undercooked stays firm and grainy after boiling. Cooking it slowly in milk also lets the starch release and thicken the mixture.

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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