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Dessert

Ginger Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, sugar, eggs, butter, cream, ginger, and salt, served with custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Ginger Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine cream, sugar, butter, and salt in a saucepan over medium heat until simmering.

  2. Remove from heat, stir in flour quickly, then return to heat and stir for 5 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and gradually mix in the eggs.

  4. Add the chopped ginger and pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for 1.5 hours, then serve with custard sauce made from the ginger syrup.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 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

Flour
Cooked with the hot cream mixture, it forms a starch structure that holds the pudding together.
Eggs
Added after cooking, they set during steaming and give the pudding its firm, tender structure.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the texture and mouthfeel of the pudding.
Preserved ginger
Provides the main flavour, with sweetness and a spicy aroma throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour off the heat. Flour added to a hot liquid can clump if not stirred quickly, leaving lumps in the batter. Returning the pan to heat and stirring cooks the starch so the batter thickens smoothly and holds its structure.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, egg, cream, 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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