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Dessert

Sponge Pudding

A steamed sponge pudding made with flour, spices, clarified dripping, egg, sugar, milk, soda, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sponge Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix together flour, ginger, tartaric acid, cloves, nutmeg, clarified dripping, raw egg, brown sugar, and milk until well combined.

  2. Dissolve the carbonate of soda in water and beat it into the mixture.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased basin, leaving space for it to swell.

  2. Steam for 2½ to 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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 main structure of the pudding as it sets.
Clarified dripping
Adds fat for a tender, rich crumb.
Raw egg
Binds the batter and helps it set with structure.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the tartaric acid to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Tartaric acid
Acid that reacts with the carbonate of soda to make the pudding rise.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses flavour that deepens the pudding.

The step that matters

Leaving space in the basin. The batter rises and swells as the leavening gas forms during steaming. Filling the basin too full can cause the batter to overflow or become dense, so leaving headroom lets it expand properly.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, clove, nutmeg, egg, 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.

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