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Dessert

Newcastle Pudding

A steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, ground almonds, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Newcastle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the well-beaten eggs, flour, and ground almonds; mix well.

  3. Stir in the baking powder.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased mold.

  2. Steam for 1½ hours.

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. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the pudding a light, tender crumb and rich flavour.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture as they set during steaming.
Sugar
Creams with the butter to aerate the batter and adds sweetness.
Flour
Provides the main structure that sets as the pudding cooks.
Ground almonds
Add moisture, tenderness and a nutty aroma to the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to make the pudding rise and become lighter.

The step that matters

Stir in the baking powder. Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it gets wet and warm, so it should be mixed in last and the mold filled and put to steam promptly. Waiting too long lets the rising power fade, leaving a denser pudding.

“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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