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Dessert

Delicious Pudding

A steamed pudding made with molasses, raisins, spices, flour, baking soda, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Delicious Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine molasses, water, baking soda, raisins, spices, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add flour gradually until a stiff batter forms.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

  2. Steam for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Serve with hard 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Adds dark sweetness, moisture and a deep flavor to the pudding.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and pockets of concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.
Flour
Provides structure, setting the batter into a firm, sliceable pudding when steamed.

The step that matters

Add flour gradually until a stiff batter forms. Adding flour in stages lets you judge the thickness, so the batter is stiff enough to hold its shape without becoming dense or tough from overmixing.

“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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