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Dessert

Fig Pudding

A steamed pudding made with figs, sugar, butter, flour, baking powder, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fig Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and gradually add the sugar.

  2. Sift the baking powder with the flour.

  3. Add the water and flour alternately.

  4. Fold in the chopped figs and the beaten egg whites.

Steam the pudding

  1. Pour the mixture into buttered molds.

  2. Place the molds in a kettle.

  3. Add boiling water until it reaches the top of the molds.

  4. Boil for 15 minutes.

  5. Place the molds in a cooker for 2 hours.

  6. Serve with hard 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + figtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,192 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + figtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,042 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to create a tender, fine-textured crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as it sets during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Eggs
Egg whites, beaten and folded in, add lightness and help set the structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps tenderize the creamed butter mixture.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites. Beaten whites trap air that gives the pudding lift. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring vigorously deflates the batter and yields a dense pudding.

Swap the fig

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figthe original
  4. Lemonfits about as well

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