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Dessert

Huckleberry Pudding

A pudding made with huckleberries, molasses, spices, and milk, baked for 2½ 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, mix the 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 the huckleberries.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding mold.

  2. Boil for 2½ hours.

  3. Let cool, then turn out for dessert.

  4. 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 dark color, rich sweetness and a deep, treacly flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses acidity to lighten the batter as it cooks.
Flour
Gives the pudding body and structure so it holds together like pound cake.
Huckleberries
Add fruity flavor, moisture and bursts of tartness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Flour must be added until the batter reaches pound cake consistency. Too little leaves a loose pudding that may collapse, while too much makes it dense and heavy once steamed.

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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