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Dessert

Steamed Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, brown sugar, milk, currants, eggs, baking soda, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Steamed Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine suet, brown sugar, milk, currants, eggs, and baking soda.

  2. Add flour gradually until the mixture thickens.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

Steam

  1. Steam for 3 hours until cooked through.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Suet
Adds fat and richness, giving the pudding a moist, tender crumb as it melts during steaming.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the pudding structure as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the mixture and gives the pudding its body and structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity in the mixture to lighten the texture and help it rise.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses flavour that deepens the pudding's taste.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness, tartness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the flour gradually. Flour thickens the batter as it is stirred in. Adding it all at once can create lumps and a batter that is too stiff, so it should be added slowly until the mixture thickens.

Swap the currant

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

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

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