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Boiled Oatmeal Pudding

A boiled pudding made from oatmeal, milk, suet, eggs, spices, and optional raisins, served with a currant sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Oatmeal Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the oatmeal with cold water, then stir in the boiling milk or water.

  2. Add the suet, eggs, spice, sugar, and sultana raisins if using.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased basin and cover with a cloth.

  4. Boil for 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, boil the currants in water for 5 minutes.

  2. Break up the currants with a spoon and stir in the flour mixed with a little cold water.

  3. Add spice and sugar to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding with the sauce, or sweeten with treacle for children.

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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Coarse oatmeal
Forms the body of the pudding and absorbs liquid as it cooks, giving it a soft, thick texture.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks, giving the pudding structure.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist and tender.
Flour
Thickens the currant sauce so it becomes smooth and coats a spoon.
Currants
Soften in boiling water to give the sauce its fruity sweetness and body.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding gently and keep the basin covered. Boiling in a covered basin traps steam, which cooks the pudding evenly and keeps it moist. Letting the water boil too hard or the cover slip can leave the pudding uneven or dry at the edges.

“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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