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Dessert

Steamed Pudding

A steamed bread pudding made with raisins, bread, butter, milk, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Steamed Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a steaming dish.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for two hours.

  2. Serve with sour or 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Raisin + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,111 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy bits of fruit throughout the pudding.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and moisture, helping the pudding stay soft and rich.
Chopped bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up liquid and setting as it steams.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist texture.
Sweet milk
Supplies liquid that softens the bread and binds the mixture together.
Baking soda
Produces gas in the batter that lightens the pudding's texture as it cooks.

The step that matters

Keeping the steam steady for two hours. Steam carries gentle, even heat into the pudding. If the steam drops or the pot runs dry, the centre cooks slowly and the pudding turns dense and unevenly set.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (syrup, bread, butter, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, bread, butter, 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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