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Pork Pudding

A steamed pork pudding made with molasses, sour milk, salt pork, baking soda, flour, and served with a lemon-flavored sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,386 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Pork Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine molasses, sour milk, chopped salt pork, and baking soda.

  2. Gradually add flour until the mixture is thick.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a steaming dish and steam for 2 hours.

  2. Prepare a liquid sauce and flavor it with lemon before serving.

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. Milk + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Molasses + saucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together280 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 sweetness, dark color, and a rich, moist flavor.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to help the pudding rise and stay tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Salt pork fat
Adds richness and moisture, and keeps the pudding from drying out while it steams.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the pudding and thickens the batter.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Add flour gradually until the mixture is thick. Too much flour at once makes the pudding dense and heavy, while too little leaves it loose and wet.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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