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Dessert

Steamed Blackberry Pudding

A steamed pudding made with pastry flour, butter, baking powder, blackberries, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Steamed Blackberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix and sift the dry ingredients.

  2. Rub in the butter with your fingertips.

  3. Add the milk and mix quickly.

  4. Dredge the blackberries with flour and stir in lightly.

Steam and serve

  1. Fill a buttered mold two-thirds full, cover tightly, and steam for 1½ hours, adding more boiling water if necessary.

  2. Serve very hot with foamy 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 + milktop 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Pastry flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as it sets.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it adds tenderness and richness to the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas as it heats, helping the pudding rise and turn light.
Blackberries
Add fruit flavour, moisture and tartness to the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the batter into a moist dough.

The step that matters

Mix the milk in quickly. Overmixing once the liquid meets the flour develops gluten, which makes the pudding tough and dense rather than tender.

“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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