Skip to main content
Dessert

Black-Cap Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, milk, eggs, sugar, salt, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Black-Cap Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Put the flour and salt into a bowl.

  2. Make a hole in the center.

  3. Break in the eggs.

  4. Add the milk gradually.

  5. Stir.

  6. Work in the flour from the sides.

  7. Beat the batter well.

  8. Add the remaining milk, sugar, and currants.

  9. Let the batter stand for 1 hour for a lighter pudding.

Steam and serve

  1. Cover with greased paper.

  2. Steam for 1.5 hours.

  3. Serve with melted butter.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

Flour
Forms the batter's structure, which sets as the pudding steams.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set firm when steamed.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter a soft, moist texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning at the surface.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy fruit pieces throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Beat the batter well. Thorough beating develops the gluten in the flour and incorporates air, giving the pudding structure and a lighter crumb. Under-beaten batter can steam up dense and lumpy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, milk, egg. 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.

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes