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Steam Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sour milk, eggs, sugar, fruit, baking soda, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Steam Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a basin, combine sour milk, eggs, sugar, ripe fruit, baking soda, and salt.

  2. Add enough flour to create a stiff batter.

Steam

  1. Tie a cloth over the basin and steam for 2 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during steaming.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding a tender crumb.
Ripe fruit
Adds moisture, flavor, and sweetness to the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to leaven the batter.
Flour
Provides the starch and protein that set the batter into a firm pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. The batter should be stiff but not overmixed. Too much flour makes the pudding dense, while too little leaves it loose and unable to hold its shape during steaming.

“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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