Skip to main content
Dessert

Austrian Pudding

A sweet pudding made with flour, suet, treacle, milk, and lemon rind, baked in a mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Austrian Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the flour with the suet, salt, baking powder, lemon rind, and sugar.

  2. Combine the lukewarm milk with the treacle and stir it into the flour mixture.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-oiled mold and tie it in a floured cloth.

  2. Boil for three hours and serve with sweet 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 pudding as the batter sets during boiling.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender while it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the pudding rises and stays light.
Treacle
Provides sweetness, dark color and a rich molasses flavor.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the batter into a pourable mixture.

The step that matters

Boil for three hours. The pudding must be kept at a steady boil for the full time, with the cloth sealed tightly; if the water drops or the cloth leaks, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn heavy and wet.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, milk. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes