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Dessert

Water Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, sugar, currants, citron, spices, and soda, cooked in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Water Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, sugar, currants, citron, mixed spice, and salt.

  2. Dissolve the carbonate of soda in ½ cup of cold water and add to the dry ingredients.

  3. Pour in the boiling water and mix well.

Rest and steam

  1. Let the mixture stand for 30 minutes or longer.

  2. Pour into a buttered mold and steam for 4 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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding stay moist.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit sweetness and chewy pieces throughout the pudding.
Boiling water
Adds moisture and helps the starch in the flour swell and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Steam gently for the full 4 hours. Steaming cooks the pudding evenly with moist heat. If the mold is not sealed or the water boils too hard, the pudding can become uneven or waterlogged, so the steam should stay steady for the whole time.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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