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Dessert

Steamed Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with bread crumbs, suet, flour, sweet milk, raisins, currants, citron, sugar, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Steamed Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine bread crumbs, suet, flour, sweet milk, raisins, currants, and citron in a large bowl.

  2. Add baking powder, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and grated nutmeg, then mix well.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

  2. Cover the mold with a cloth and steam for 3 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure as they set during steaming.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together once cooked.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the pudding rise and lighten.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding its soft texture.

The step that matters

Steaming the mold. The pudding must steam for the full time with the mold covered. Steam keeps the surface from drying out and lets the batter cook through gently and evenly without scorching.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, flour, milk, raisin, sugar, egg, cinnamon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, milk, raisin, sugar, egg, cinnamon. 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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