Skip to main content
Dessert

Half Pay Pudding

A sweet bread crumb pudding with currants, raisins, suet, and golden syrup, baked in a greased basin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin 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

Make the batter

  1. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl.

  2. Add the Lyle's Golden Syrup and enough milk to form a stiff batter.

  3. Beat the batter well until smooth.

Cook

  1. Pour the batter into a greased basin.

  2. Cover the basin with greased paper and tie it with a cloth.

  3. Boil for two 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. Flour + raisintop 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

Bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and absorb the milk and syrup.
All-purpose flour
Adds structure so the batter sets firm rather than loose.
Shredded suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the pudding as it heats.
Lyle's golden syrup
Adds sweetness and a caramel flavour, and helps keep the pudding moist.

The step that matters

Boil for two hours. Steaming must stay at a steady boil for the full time, because the batter needs sustained heat to set through the centre. Letting the water drop too low leaves the pudding dense and undercooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, raisin, milk, syrup. 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

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes