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Dessert

Steamed Brown Pudding

A steamed pudding made with egg, butter, sugar, sour milk, baking soda, flour, raisins, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Steamed Brown Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg and mix in the butter and sugar until creamy.

  2. Add the sour milk and baking soda, then gradually stir in enough flour to form a stiff batter.

  3. Flour the raisins and currants, then fold them into the batter.

Prepare the cloth

  1. Scald a cloth and flour it.

  2. Place the cloth in a colander.

  3. Pour the batter into the cloth.

Steam

  1. Steam the pudding for 2 hours.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Butter and flour 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

Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it sets during steaming.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender crumb by coating flour particles.
Sour milk
Provides moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Flour
Forms the batter's structure as its starch sets with heat.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture and dark fruit flavour throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Pour the batter into the floured cloth. The cloth must be well floured and the pudding given room to swell, because flour forms a protective skin and batter that is packed too tightly can steam heavy and dense.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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