Skip to main content
Dessert

Ginger Pudding

A steamed or boiled pudding made from flour, bread crumbs, suet, sugar, treacle, lemon, ginger, baking powder, milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ginger Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Mix the baking powder, ginger, sugar, salt, and flour together in a bowl.

  2. Add the suet, ensuring it is free of skin, along with the bread crumbs and grated lemon rind.

  3. Moisten the mixture with treacle and lemon juice, adding just enough milk to form a stiff mass.

Cook and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a greased mold or basin, cover with greased paper or a floured pudding cloth.

  2. Boil or steam for 1.5 hours.

  3. Serve with sweet 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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the bulk and structure that holds the stiff pudding mass together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and lighten the texture of the dense pudding.
Treacle or golden syrup
Adds sweetness, moisture and a deep, rich flavour.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming to give the pudding some lift.
Ground ginger
Provides the warm, spicy aroma that defines the pudding.

The step that matters

Moisten to a stiff mass. Adding too much milk makes the mixture wet and heavy, so the pudding turns out soggy and dense. The mixture should hold together without being runny, and the baking powder works best when the batter is not overworked or left to sit too long.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, bread, beef, sugar, syrup, ginger, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, beef, sugar, syrup, ginger, 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.

More ginger pudding recipes

Steamed 11Preserved 6Plain 3 See all 105 →

You might also like

Soft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesGingerbreadGingerbread25 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipes