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Dessert

Geaham Pudding

A steamed pudding made with molasses, sweet milk, graham flour, baking soda, sugar, flour, butter, nutmeg, boiling water, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Geaham Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine molasses, sweet milk, graham flour, and dissolved baking soda.

  2. Steam the mixture for 3 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix sugar, flour, and butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add nutmeg and boiling water, stirring until smooth.

  3. Finally, stir in the vinegar.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses and sour acid to produce gas, lightening the pudding's texture.
Graham flour
Provides the bulk and structure of the pudding, with its coarse bran adding a hearty texture.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark color, and a deep sweetness to the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, mellow body.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce until smooth. Flour and butter must be mixed fully with the sugar before the boiling water goes in, or the flour will clump and the sauce will turn lumpy instead of silky.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Allspicefits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

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