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Dessert

Gingerbread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from grated stale bread, flour, suet, ginger, baking powder, treacle, and flavoring, boiled in a mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Gingerbread Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the grated bread, flour, suet, ginger, baking powder, and flavoring in a bowl.

  2. Add the warmed treacle and stir until a smooth paste forms.

  3. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

Cook

  1. Boil the mold for 2 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 + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Ginger + almondtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,410 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Grated fine, it gives the pudding its body and soaks up the treacle.
All-purpose flour
Adds structure so the paste holds together when steamed.
Beef suet
Adds fat, giving the pudding a rich, moist texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking, helping the pudding rise and turn light.
Treacle
Provides sweetness, dark color, and a deep molasses flavor.

The step that matters

Stir the treacle into a smooth paste. Treacle is thick and sticky, so it must be fully worked through the dry ingredients. Lumps left unmixed can cook unevenly and leave pockets of dense, sweet paste in the finished pudding.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, beef, almond. 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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