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 ↓
Dumplings and TVDDlNGS
Ingredients
Directions
Make and boil the pudding
Use about 4 eggs for every ½ pound of flour to ensure the batter is firm.
Boil the pudding for twice as long as you would bake it.
Do not touch the boiling pudding once it is on the stove.
Carefully add water if it boils down, ensuring the mold does not touch the kettle.
Ensure the water remains boiling at all times.
If the outside is brown but not cooked through, cover with white paper until fully cooked.
Serve
Once cooked, turn the pudding out of the dish, bottom side up, and sprinkle with finely sifted sugar.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together106,462 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together122,807 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 bulk of the batter and provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
- Eggs
- Bind the batter and help it set firm as it cooks.
The step that matters
Keep the water boiling throughout. Boiling water keeps the pudding cooking at a steady high heat. If the water drops, cooking slows and the pudding can turn out heavy or unevenly set. Keeping the mold off the kettle's bottom prevents scorching.
“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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