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Dessert

Treacle Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, breadcrumbs, treacle, lemon rind, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,404 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Treacle Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pastry

  1. Mix the flour, suet, baking powder, and salt together.

  2. Form into a stiff paste with cold water.

  3. Divide the paste into two equal portions.

  4. Line a pudding basin with one portion.

  5. Cut off enough paste from the other portion to form a lid and roll the remainder out thinly.

Fill and steam

  1. Add a layer of treacle in the basin, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and lemon rind.

  2. Cut a round from the rolled-out paste to cover the treacle, moisten the edges, and join to the basin lining.

  3. Add another layer of treacle, breadcrumbs, and lemon rind, and cover with pastry as before.

  4. Repeat until the basin is full, then cover with greased paper.

  5. Steam for 2.5 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 + 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

Flour
Forms the paste that wraps and holds the pudding together.
Suet
Adds richness and a tender, crumbly texture to the pastry.
Baking powder
Lightens the pastry so it rises slightly as it cooks.
Treacle
Provides sweetness and a dark, rich flavour in each layer.
Breadcrumbs
Soak up the treacle and keep the filling from becoming soggy.

The step that matters

Joining the pastry lid to the basin lining. If the edges are not moistened and sealed, steam can escape or the filling can leak out during the long steaming, so the pudding may collapse or turn out dry.

“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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