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Dessert

Good Paste for Steamed Pudding

A steamed pudding made with a flour paste and fruit, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and rhubarb match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 670 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Good Paste for Steamed Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour and baking powder.

  2. Cut in the butter and lard until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

Assemble and steam

  1. Line a buttered mold with the paste.

  2. Add the fruit and sprinkle with sugar.

  3. Cover the top with more paste.

  4. 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. Flour + rhubarbtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together670 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the paste that holds the pudding together.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming so the pudding rises and becomes light.
Butter
Cut into the flour to add richness and tenderness to the paste.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the paste short and tender in texture.
Fruit
Provides moisture and flavor inside the pudding.

The step that matters

Cutting in the butter and lard. Fat should stay in small, coarse pieces rather than fully blending into the flour. As the pudding steams, these pieces melt and leave pockets that keep the paste tender instead of tough and dense.

Swap the rhubarb

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Rhubarbthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, 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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