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Dessert

Treacle Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, treacle, lemon, ginger, bread crumbs, and boiled in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Treacle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a firm pastry with flour and suet, rolling it out to ⅓ inch thick.

  2. Butter a pudding basin and line it with the pastry.

Fill and seal

  1. Layer pastry and treacle in the basin until full, finishing with a pastry cover.

  2. Moisten the edges and pinch them together to seal.

  3. Flour a pudding cloth, tie it over the basin, and plunge it into boiling water.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 3 hours, ensuring it remains covered with water.

  2. Carefully turn out onto a hot dish and serve immediately, optionally sprinkling with lemon juice, zest, and bread crumbs.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Molasses + gingertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + molassestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the firm pastry that encloses the treacle and holds the pudding together.
Suet or dripping
Adds fat to the pastry, keeping it tender and rich as it steams.
Treacle
Provides the sweet, dark filling that soaks into the pastry while it steams.

The step that matters

Keep the pudding covered with water while boiling. If the water level drops and the pudding is exposed, the pastry dries and cooks unevenly. Steady, continuous boiling keeps the steam gentle and the crust moist.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, molasses, lemon, bread):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, molasses, lemon, bread. 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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