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Partridge Pudding

A boiled pudding made with jointed partridges, suet crust, salt, pepper, water, optional mushrooms, and optional mace or nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Partridge Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skull the partridges and cut them into joints.

  2. Line a deep basin with suet crust.

  3. Season the partridge joints with pepper or cayenne and salt.

  4. If using mushrooms, layer them alternately with the partridge in the pudding.

  5. Optionally, use pounded mace or nutmeg for additional flavor.

Cook

  1. Pour in enough water to create gravy.

  2. Close the pudding carefully and boil for 3 to 3.5 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. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Partridges
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender during the long slow boil.
Suet crust
Forms a rich, sturdy casing that holds the filling and keeps it moist while boiling.
Water
Creates the gravy that keeps the meat moist and carries flavor through the pudding.

The step that matters

Close the pudding carefully. A tight seal keeps water from getting in and diluting the filling, and keeps the steam and juices inside during the long boil. A loose seal lets the gravy leak out and the meat dry out.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, mushroom):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mushroom. 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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