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Dessert

Citron Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sweet milk, flour, butter, sugar, citron, lemon juice, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Citron Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sift the baking powder into the flour.

  2. Beat the sugar and butter together until creamy.

Mix and steam

  1. Add the milk, flour, citron, and lemon juice to the mixture and combine well.

  2. Pour the mixture into a 2-quart basin.

  3. Steam for 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with transparent 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. 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as it sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming, lightening the pudding's texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, moist crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps create a creamy base when beaten with butter.
Sliced citron
Adds candied fruit flavour and chewy pieces throughout the pudding.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and helps bind the batter.

The step that matters

Beat the sugar and butter until creamy. Creaming incorporates air into the fat, which helps give the steamed pudding a light texture. Under-beaten butter and sugar leave a dense, heavy result.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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