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Sausage Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet pastry, sausage, onion, sage, pepper, salt, butter, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sausage Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Line a small basin with half the suet pastry.

  2. Add half the sausage, then add pepper, salt, and sage.

  3. Fry the onion in the butter, then add flour and stock; boil for 2 minutes and allow to cool.

  4. Pour the mixture into the basin, add the remaining sausage, and cover with the rest of the pastry.

  5. Cover the pudding and steam it 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. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sage + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,312 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet pastry
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and holds it together while steaming.
Sausage
Supplies the main meaty flavour and bulk of the filling.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma when fried gently in the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the fried onion.
Stock
Adds moisture so the filling stays tender as it steams.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before filling. Cooling the boiled onion and stock mixture before pouring it in keeps hot liquid from softening the suet pastry before the pudding is steamed.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sage, pepper, butter):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, pepper, butter. 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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