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Dessert

Gingerbread Pudding

A baked gingerbread pudding served with a boiled sugar syrup sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Gingerbread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Stir molasses, melted butter, and boiling water together in a bowl.

  3. Add ginger and cinnamon, then mix in flour.

  4. Pour batter into two greased bread tins and bake until done.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan and boil for 15 minutes.

  2. Beat egg yolks and stir into boiling syrup.

  3. Place saucepan in a larger pan of hot water until mixture thickens.

  4. Add butter and beaten egg whites, then stir in vanilla extract.

Serve

  1. Serve sauce warm over pudding.

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. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Gives the pudding its dark color, deep flavor, sweetness and moisture.
Flour
Provides starch and gluten that set the batter's structure as it bakes.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the sauce, and beaten whites add lightness to it.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses' acidity to release gas and help the pudding rise.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a moist, tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and thickens it as it boils down.

The step that matters

Stirring egg yolks into boiling syrup. Hot syrup can scramble the yolks into lumps if added too quickly or unstirred. Adding them gradually while stirring lets the yolks dissolve smoothly and thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, cinnamon, butter, flour, sugar, egg, vanilla):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, cinnamon, butter, flour, sugar, egg, vanilla. 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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