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Dessert

Boiled Currant Pudding

A boiled pudding made with currants, suet, salt, and milk, served with jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,475 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Boiled Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the currants, removing any stalks or grit.

  2. Finely chop the suet.

  3. Mix the currants, suet, salt, and enough milk to form a stiff batter.

  4. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Place in boiling water and boil for 3.5 hours.

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Milk + saucetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Currant + saucetop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together628 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide the fruit body and tart, sweet flavour of the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Milk
Moistens the dry ingredients so they bind into a stiff batter.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth. The cloth must be floured and the pudding tied loosely enough to leave room to swell. A tight or unfloured cloth can stick to the pudding or restrict expansion during boiling.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sauce. 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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