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Dessert

Huckleberry Pudding

A sweet pudding made with huckleberries, molasses, spices, and flour, boiled for 2.5 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Huckleberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine molasses, salt, cloves, cinnamon, and baking soda dissolved in sweet milk.

  2. Add flour until the mixture reaches the consistency of pound cake.

  3. Gently fold in huckleberries.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding mold.

  2. Boil for 2.5 hours.

  3. Serve with cream and sugar or pudding 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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Molasses + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Molasses + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Provides the main sweetness and dark color, and a rich, slightly bitter flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses acidity to lighten the batter and help it rise.
Flour
Gives the pudding its structure so it holds together rather than turning mushy.
Huckleberries
Add tart, fruity flavor and moisture, and create pockets of juice through the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Flour sets the batter's structure, so it must reach the stated pound-cake consistency. Too little leaves a loose, wet pudding, while too much makes it dense and heavy.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, cinnamon, milk, 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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