Name: Whortleberry Pudding
Ingredients: 1 pint molasses; 1 pint water; 1 tablespoon salt; flour to make a stiff batter; 1 quart whortleberries

Whortleberry Pudding

A sweet pudding made with molasses, water, salt, flour, and whortleberries, boiled for hours and served with butter and sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients

Why it works: Molasses and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,429 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Whortleberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

Combine molasses and water in a pot.
Add salt and stir well.
Gradually mix in flour until a stiff batter forms.
Fold in the whortleberries.

Cook and serve

Boil the mixture for three hours.
Serve with a cold butter and sugar 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.

Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,429 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour: Thickens the liquid into a stiff batter that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Molasses: Adds dark sweetness and a rich, deep flavor to the pudding.
Whortleberries: Add fruit flavor and moisture throughout the pudding as they cook.

“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.