Skip to main content
Dessert

Half-pay Pudding

A suet pudding with currants, raisins, flour, breadcrumbs, treacle, and milk, boiled for 3½ hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Half-pay Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the suet finely.

  2. Mix the suet with the currants (washed and dried), raisins (stoned), flour, breadcrumbs, and treacle.

Mix and cook

  1. Moisten the mixture with milk and beat until thoroughly combined.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a buttered basin.

  3. Boil the pudding for 3½ hours.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the pudding together.
Breadcrumbs
Soak up milk and help give the pudding a soft, tender body.
Treacle
Adds sweetness and a rich, deep flavour with some moisture.
Milk
Moistens the dry ingredients so they bind into a batter-like mixture.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for 3½ hours. The pudding must cook long and at a steady simmer so the suet melts and the starch fully sets. Too little time leaves it heavy and doughy, and a rolling boil that dries the water can scorch the basin.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, 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.

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