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Dessert

Molasses Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, molasses, butter, water, and baking soda, served warm with a butter-sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Molasses Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix the flour, molasses, melted butter, hot water, and baking soda in a large bowl until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

Steam the pudding

  1. Steam the pudding for three hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Cream together butter and sugar.

  2. Add hot water to reach the desired consistency and flavor with vanilla.

  3. Serve the pudding warm with the 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + molassestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Molasses + buttertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,123 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the pudding its structure.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture, and deep flavor, and its acidity reacts with the baking soda.
Melted butter
Adds fat that coats the flour and keeps the pudding tender and rich.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to produce gas that lifts and lightens the batter.

The step that matters

Keeping the steam steady. Steaming is gentle, even heat, so the water must keep up a steady simmer for the full three hours. If the pot boils dry or the heat drops, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn dense.

“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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