Skip to main content
Dessert

Graham Pudding

A steamed pudding made with graham flour, all-purpose flour, molasses, sour milk, raisins, butter, baking soda, sugar, eggs, hot water, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Graham Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, mix graham flour, all-purpose flour, molasses, sour milk, raisins, butter, and baking soda.

  2. Pour the mixture into a steamer and steam for 2.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, combine sugar, butter, and the beaten yolks of the eggs in a saucepan.

  2. Add hot water, lemon rind, and lemon juice, and cook together.

  3. While cooking, fold in the beaten egg whites.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 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

Graham flour
Provides the structure and the coarse, hearty texture of the pudding.
All-purpose flour
Adds gluten for structure so the pudding holds together after steaming.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk and molasses to release carbon dioxide, which lightens the pudding.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture, dark colour and a deep flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, giving a tender crumb.
Eggs
Yolks enrich the sauce and bind it, while beaten whites add lightness.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whites, which lighten the sauce. Stirring vigorously deflates them and leaves it dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More graham pudding recipes

Steamed 22Apple 3 See all 149 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesMolasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipes