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Dessert

Steamed Pudding

A steamed pudding made with eggs, flour, brown sugar, butter, raisins, baking powder, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Steamed Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Whip the brown sugar and butter together until creamy.

  2. Add the eggs and beat thoroughly.

  3. Mix in the lemon peel, flour, and baking powder until well combined. Fold in the raisins gently.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered bowl and place it in a steamer immediately.

  2. Steam for 2 hours, ensuring it is tightly covered and the water is boiling constantly.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set during steaming.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding as the batter sets.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the pudding.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps give the pudding a deeper flavour.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the batter so the pudding rises and stays tender.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling constantly while steaming. Steamed puddings cook gently by the heat of steam. If the water stops boiling or the bowl is not tightly covered, the temperature drops and the pudding can turn out dense and undercooked in the centre.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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