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Dessert

Baroness Pudding

A suet and raisin pudding steamed for about three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Baroness Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

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

  2. Add the milk and stir well until combined.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-greased basin.

  2. Boil or steam for about 3 hours.

  3. Serve with a sweet sauce or a sprinkle of sugar.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist as it steams.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and structure that set the pudding as it cooks.
Stoned raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the mixture into a soft, spoonable batter.

The step that matters

Keeping the steam steady for 3 hours. A long steam needs a steady simmer and enough water in the pot. If the water boils dry or the heat drops, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn out dense or soggy.

“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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