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Dessert

No Egg Suet Pudding

A steamed suet pudding made without eggs, using flour, raisins, sugar, buttermilk, and leavening.

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

No Egg Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub the chopped suet into the flour.

  2. Mix in the chopped raisins and sugar.

Make the batter

  1. Add the buttermilk or sweet milk, cream of tartar, butter, and baking soda.

  2. Stir until well combined and season with salt.

Steam

  1. Steam the mixture for three 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sugar + buttermilktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist as it steams.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Buttermilk or sweet milk
Supplies the liquid that hydrates the flour and binds the mixture.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so it reacts with baking soda to lighten the texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that helps it rise.
Raisins
Add pockets of concentrated sweetness and chewy texture.

The step that matters

Stir until well combined. Baking soda and cream of tartar react as soon as they meet liquid, so the mixture should be combined evenly and steamed promptly to keep the gas trapped and the texture light.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, buttermilk, cream, butter):

  1. Raisinthe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Strawberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, buttermilk, cream, butter. 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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