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Dessert

Boiled Pudding

A boiled pudding made with raisins, nuts, citron, butter, flour, eggs, buttermilk, baking soda, sugar, and molasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine raisins, nuts, citron, butter, flour, eggs, buttermilk, baking soda, sugar, and molasses in a bowl and mix until well combined.

  2. Grease and flour a pudding mold.

  3. Pour the mixture into the mold.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the mold in a pot of boiling water.

  2. Boil for 3 hours.

  3. Serve with 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Buttermilk + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help give the pudding its set structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk and molasses to lighten the pudding.
Black molasses
Adds dark color, moisture and a deep, sweet flavor.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and acidity that activates the baking soda.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.

The step that matters

Boil for 3 hours. The mold must stay submerged in boiling water for the full time so the pudding cooks through evenly. Water that drops too low or stops boiling leaves the center underset and the texture uneven.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Walnutfits about as well
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, butter, flour, egg, buttermilk, sugar, molasses. 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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