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Dessert

Ginger Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, moist sugar, grated ginger, and butter, wrapped in cloth and cooked for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ginger Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil a large saucepan of water.

  2. Chop the suet finely after removing the skin.

  3. In a basin, mix the flour and chopped suet, ensuring no lumps remain.

  4. Grate the ginger and add it along with the moist sugar to the mixture, then mix well.

  5. Butter a 1‑pint basin and transfer the mixture into it.

Steam and serve

  1. Soak a pudding cloth in hot water, then cold, and sprinkle flour over it.

  2. Cover the basin with the floured cloth and tie it securely with string.

  3. Once the water is boiling, place the pudding in and boil for at least six hours.

  4. Carefully remove the basin, take off the cloth, and turn the pudding onto a hot dish.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  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
Forms the body of the pudding and sets with the fat and steam.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps give the pudding its dark colour.
Ginger
Provides the warm, spicy aroma that defines the pudding.
Butter
Greases the basin so the pudding releases cleanly when turned out.

The step that matters

Keeping the water boiling for the full cooking time. The pudding cooks by steam from boiling water. If the water drops below a boil, cooking slows and the pudding can turn out heavy and underdone. Topping up with boiling water keeps the heat steady.

Swap the ginger

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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