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Currant and Suet Pudding

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,675 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Currant and Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the suet and parsley finely.

  2. Mix the suet, parsley, coarse sea salt, flour, currants, and sugar in a bowl.

  3. Prepare a pudding cloth by dipping it in boiling water, squeezing it dry, and sprinkling it with flour.

  4. Place the mixture into the prepared pudding cloth, tie it securely, and steam for the recommended time.

  5. Serve warm, optionally with sugar sprinkled on top.

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. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  4. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  5. Parsley + curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Swap the currant

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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