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Dessert

Steamed Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, milk, eggs, sugar, and berries or raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the baking powder and salt with the flour.

  2. Add the milk and melted Cottolene to the flour mixture.

  3. Beat the yolks of the eggs, add the sugar and mix well into the batter.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  5. Gently add the berries rolled in flour or the floured raisins.

Steam and serve

  1. Turn the mixture into a well-greased pudding boiler.

  2. Set the boiler in a kettle of boiling water and boil continuously for two hours.

  3. Serve with cream 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise and stay light.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, with whipped whites lightening the batter.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter a soft, moist texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to a tender crumb.
Berries
Add moisture, fruity flavour and pockets of juice throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep the boiler in continuously boiling water for two hours. If the water stops boiling, steam output drops and the pudding can turn heavy and undercooked. Keeping the water topped up and at a steady boil maintains even heat and steam for the full time.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

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