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Dessert

Boiled Currant Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, currants, baking powder, salt, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sift the flour and baking powder together in a bowl.

  2. Chop the suet finely and wash the currants, drying them thoroughly.

  3. Remove any stalks or grit from the currants.

Make and boil the pudding

  1. Mix all ingredients together and add enough milk to form a stiff batter.

  2. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth and place it in boiling water.

  3. Boil for 3.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweet jelly 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding as it sets around the dough.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the pudding and helps it rise.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich in texture.
Currants
Provide small pockets of fruit sweetness and chew throughout the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the mixture forms a stiff, cohesive batter.

The step that matters

Forming the stiff batter. Too much milk makes the batter slack, so it may not hold its shape in the cloth and can cook up heavy or sodden. Add milk gradually until the mixture is stiff enough to hold together.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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