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Dessert

Currant Pudding

A sweet pudding made with currants, suet, bread crumbs, flour, and spices, boiled for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the minced suet with the bread crumbs, flour, currants, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Add enough milk to make a soft dough.

  3. Beat the mixture together and tie it in a cloth prepared as directed.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for three hours.

  2. Serve with caudle or any simple sweet sauce.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a light, tender body.
Flour
Provides structure so the dough holds together when boiled.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth. The cloth must be tied loosely enough for the pudding to swell as it cooks, but snugly enough to keep water out. Too tight a tie can crack or compress the pudding, and a loose or leaky tie lets boiling water soak in and make it soggy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, milk, cinnamon, nutmeg. 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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