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Dessert

Quick Steamed Pudding

A quick steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, milk, flour, baking powder, and fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Quick Steamed Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the sweet milk and mix well.

  3. Sift in the flour and baking powder, and stir until combined.

Fill and steam

  1. Half fill 4 cups with your choice of flavored fruit.

  2. Pour the batter into the cups until full.

  3. Steam for 20 minutes.

  4. Invert the cups to serve.

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. Milk + flourtop 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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as the batter sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the pudding rises and becomes light.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Sweet milk
Provides moisture that hydrates the flour and forms the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps tenderize the crumb when creamed with butter.

The step that matters

Filling the cups with batter. Batter needs room to rise as the baking powder releases gas during steaming. Overfilling can cause the batter to spill or become dense, so fill the cups until full but not beyond their capacity.

“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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