Skip to main content
Dessert

Steamed Bread and Butter Pudding

A steamed bread pudding made with flour, suet, baking powder, and water or milk, served with syrup or jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Steamed Bread and Butter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix the flour, salt, suet, and baking powder in a bowl.

  2. Add water or milk to form a soft dough.

Wrap and steam

  1. Dip a pudding cloth in boiling water, flour it well, and place the dough inside.

  2. Tie the cloth securely, leaving room for the pudding to swell.

  3. Place the pudding in a pan with boiling water and steam for 45 minutes.

Serve

  1. Turn out and serve with syrup or jam.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 of the dough as it sets during steaming.
Suet
Adds richness and a tender, moist crumb to the pudding.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming so the pudding rises and swells.
Water or milk
Hydrates the flour to form a soft, workable dough.

The step that matters

Leaving room in the cloth. The pudding swells as it rises and heats. If the cloth is tied too tightly, the dough is constrained and may become dense or burst the wrapping.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes