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Dessert

A Cheap Suet Pudding

A suet pudding made with flour, boiled potatoes, suet, and optional fruit, boiled for an hour and served with butter and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Cheap Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the flour, grated potatoes, suet, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add milk gradually to form a stiff batter.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the batter in a well‑floured cloth and tie it securely.

  2. Boil the pudding in plenty of fast‑boiling water for one hour.

  3. Remove the pudding from the water and turn it out onto a serving dish.

  4. Cut a small round or square from the top to prevent it from becoming heavy.

  5. Serve immediately with sugar, butter, and nutmeg if desired.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives the batter its structure as it cooks.
Potatoes
Add starch and moisture, keeping the pudding light and tender.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist while boiling.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and potato so the mixture binds into a stiff batter.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth securely with room to swell. Flour and suet expand as the pudding cooks, so a loose or poorly floured cloth can let water in or let the pudding break apart. A well-floured cloth also keeps the outer surface from sticking.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, potato, milk, apple, butter, lemon, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Thymefits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, potato, milk, apple, butter, lemon, sugar. 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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