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Dessert

Ginger Pudding

A steamed ginger pudding made with butter, sugar, egg, flour, milk, and ginger cubes, served with boiled custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Ginger Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter, then gradually add the sugar and beaten egg.

  2. Mix and sift the dry ingredients together.

  3. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk to the butter mixture.

Steam and serve

  1. Turn the mixture into a buttered mold, cover it, and steam for two hours.

  2. Serve with boiled custard made from 1 pint of milk flavored with 2 tablespoons of ginger syrup.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the pudding a rich, tender crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming so the pudding rises and becomes light.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure and richness.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour to form a smooth batter.
Ginger
Adds the characteristic warm, spicy aroma and flavor of the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Adding the dry ingredients and milk in portions keeps the batter smooth and prevents overmixing. Overworking flour develops gluten, which can make the steamed pudding tough and dense.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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