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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with molasses, milk, suet, raisins, currants, flour, baking powder, salt, and optional spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine molasses, milk, shredded suet, raisins, currants, flour, baking powder, salt, and your choice of spices or flavoring. Mix until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

  3. Steam for 2 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Prepare the hard sauce by creaming together butter and sugar.

  2. Add hot water to the sauce until it reaches the desired consistency.

  3. Flavor the sauce with vanilla or lemon.

  4. Serve the pudding with the 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. Raisin + flourtop 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

Milk and flour 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

Molasses
Adds dark color, moisture and a deep, sweet flavor to the pudding.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Shredded suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during steaming.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a batter that binds the fruit and flour.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the pudding so it is not dense.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture as they plump in the batter.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. The mold must be sealed and the water kept gently simmering for the full time. Steam escaping or the water boiling dry lets the pudding dry out or turn heavy and uneven.

Swap the currant

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

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

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