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Dessert

A Nice Suet Pudding

A suet pudding made with potatoes, raisins, molasses, and spices, boiled for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

A Nice Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil and mash the potatoes, then mix in the chopped suet.

  2. Add molasses, sugar, milk, chopped raisins, baking soda, allspice, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

  3. Work in enough flour to form a dough.

Cook

  1. Shape into a pudding and place in a tin boiler.

  2. Boil 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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Mashed potato gives the pudding a moist, soft body that holds the other ingredients together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender as it cooks.
Molasses
Adds dark sweetness, moisture, and a deep flavor to the pudding.
Flour
Provides the structure that turns the mixture into a dough that holds its shape.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to help the pudding lighten and rise.

The step that matters

Work in enough flour to form a dough. Too little flour leaves the mixture too wet to hold its shape, while too much makes the pudding dense and heavy. Stop once the dough is firm enough to shape.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, sugar, milk, raisin, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, sugar, milk, raisin, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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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