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Dessert

Blackberry Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sweet milk, flour, baking powder, blackberries, sugar, and optional butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Blackberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix sweet milk, flour, and baking powder.

Layer and steam

  1. Place a thin layer of the dough in a deep dish.

  2. Cover with blackberries and a sprinkling of sugar.

  3. Add another layer of dough, more blackberries, and sugar.

  4. Cover the last layer with dough.

  5. Steam for 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with rich cream.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming, helping the dough rise and turn light and tender.
Sweet milk
Moistens the flour and forms the dough, adding richness and softness to the crumb.
Blackberries
Release juice as they cook, moistening the layers and adding tart fruit flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the blackberries and softens their tartness.

The step that matters

Steam for 3 hours. Steam must be kept gentle and steady so the dough cooks through and rises evenly; uneven or escaping steam can leave the pudding dense or wet in places.

“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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