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Dessert

Baroness Pudding

A suet-based pudding with flour, pudding plums, sultanas, and milk, boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and milk work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 406 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Baroness Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the suet or dripping, flour, pudding plums, and sultanas in a bowl.

  2. Stir in the milk until well mixed.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding cloth or mold.

  4. Boil for 4 hours, ensuring it cooks for the proper time.

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. Plum + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together406 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + plumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Suet or dripping
Fat that keeps the pudding moist and gives it a rich, tender texture.
Flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the pudding together as it cooks.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour so the mixture forms a cohesive batter.
Pudding plums
Add fruity sweetness and moisture, flavouring the pudding as it cooks.
Sultanas
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boiling for the full 4 hours. Long, steady cooking gives the starch in the flour time to gelatinise and set fully. A pudding that is cooked for less time stays wet, dense and doughy in the centre.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Plumthe 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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