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Dessert

Jam Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, breadcrumbs, suet, sugar, baking powder, jam, and water, served with custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Jam Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pastry

  1. Mix flour, bread crumbs, suet, sugar, and baking powder in a bowl.

  2. Add cold water to form a stiff paste and roll it out very thin.

Assemble and steam

  1. Grease a pudding basin and line it with the pastry.

  2. Spread jam on the bottom, then layer with pastry, repeating until the basin is full.

  3. Cover with greased paper and steam for 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Turn out and serve with custard 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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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 main structure of the pastry once mixed with water.
Bread crumbs
Adds body and a light, crumbly texture to the pastry.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pastry tender and rich as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming so the pastry rises and lightens.
Jam
Provides sweetness and fruity flavour that soaks into the layers as it steams.

The step that matters

Add cold water to form a stiff paste. Too much water makes the pastry soggy and tough, while a stiff dough stays firm enough to roll thin and hold its shape in the basin during long steaming.

“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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