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Dessert

Black Pudding

A sweet pudding made with prunes, flour, eggs, spices, and a syrup sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Black Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine chopped prunes, flour, egg yolks, cloves, cinnamon, and salt.

  2. Dissolve baking soda in hot water and add it to the mixture.

  3. Add baking powder to the flour and mix well.

Steam and make the sauce

  1. Pour the batter into a greased pan and steam for 2 hours.

  2. For the sauce, boil sugar and water until it reaches a hair's breadth consistency.

  3. Pour the hot syrup over the stiffly beaten egg whites and mix to taste.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Cooked prunes
Provide moisture, sweetness and the dark color of the pudding.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the batter as its starch sets during steaming.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the batter to produce gas that lightens the texture.
Baking powder
Adds further rising so the pudding becomes light and tender.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they add airiness to the finished pudding.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar syrup to a hair's breadth consistency. Sugar syrup that is too cool stays thin, and if it is overcooked it turns hard or brittle. Hot syrup poured over whipped whites cooks them slightly and sets the foam, so the timing and temperature of the syrup matter.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

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