Skip to main content
Dessert

Black or Red-currant Pudding

A pudding made from currants, sugar, flour, and suet or butter crust, boiled for 2–3 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Black or Red-currant Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a suet or butter crust with ½ lb flour.

  2. Butter a basin and line it with part of the crust.

  3. Remove the stalks from the currants and place them in the basin.

  4. Sprinkle the sugar over the currants.

Cook

  1. Cover the pudding with the remaining crust and secure the edges tightly.

  2. Tie it down with a floured cloth.

  3. Place it in boiling water and boil for 2 to 3 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. For a crust that is crisp, brown it in a very hot oven for a few minutes before serving.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Black currant + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Red or black currants
Provide the tart fruit that forms the filling of the pudding.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the currants and draws out juice that softens the filling.
Flour
Forms the structure of the crust that encloses the fruit.
Suet or butter crust
Encases the fruit and gives the pudding its rich, tender pastry.

The step that matters

Securing the edges and tying the cloth. If the crust edges are not sealed tightly and the cloth is not secured, boiling water can seep into the basin and dilute the filling. A tight seal keeps the fruit and its juices contained while the pudding steams and cooks through.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, 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.

More currant pudding recipes

Boiled 18Steamed 5Apple 3Black 3Raspberry 3Red 3 See all 60 →

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes