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Dessert

Boiled Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, molasses, suet, sour milk, raisins, currants, citron, and leavening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Boiled Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Rub the raisins and currants into the flour.

  2. Mix in the suet, molasses, and sour milk.

  3. Add the cream of tartar, baking soda dissolved in milk, and a pinch of salt.

  4. Thoroughly mix all ingredients.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam in a buttered dish or mold with a well-fitting cover for 3 to 4 hours.

  2. Serve hot with wine or butter 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

Flour
Forms the bulk and structure of the pudding as it steams.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark colour and moisture to the batter.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender.
Sour milk
Supplies liquid and acidity that reacts with the leavening.
Cream of tartar
Acidic salt that reacts with baking soda to help the pudding rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk and cream of tartar to produce gas for lift.

The step that matters

Steam for the full 3 to 4 hours with a well-fitting cover. Steaming gently and steadily cooks the dense batter through. A loose cover lets steam escape and water level drops, so the pudding can end up dry or underbaked in the centre.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, molasses, beef, milk, raisin, cream. 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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