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Dessert

Potato Flour Pudding, Steamed

A steamed pudding made from potato flour, milk, eggs, sugar, and decorated with raisins and candied fruits.

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

Potato Flour Pudding, Steamed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix potato flour with a little cold milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. Pour boiling milk over the paste and add sugar and beaten eggs.

  3. Butter a round mold and decorate with raisins and candied fruits.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the pudding mixture into the mold and cover with oiled paper.

  2. Place the mold on an upside-down plate in a saucepan with boiling water, ensuring water does not overflow.

  3. Steam for 1.5 hours until done.

  4. Carefully turn the pudding onto a hot dish 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Potato flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, sliceable pudding structure.
Eggs
Set when heated, giving the pudding its firm, custard-like structure.
Milk
Provides liquid that the starch and egg proteins set within, adding softness and richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to the pudding's flavour.

The step that matters

Keep the steaming water at a gentle boil without overflow. Steam heats the mold gently and evenly. If the water boils too hard or splashes into the mold, the pudding can become watery or pocked, and uneven heat can leave the centre undercooked or the edges rubbery.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

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