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Dessert

Gingerbread Pudding

A steamed pudding made with stale bread crumbs, flour, beef suet, ginger, baking powder, treacle, milk, and almond flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Gingerbread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub the stale bread through a wire sieve.

  2. Mix the bread crumbs with flour, suet, ginger, and baking powder.

  3. Dissolve treacle in milk and add almond flavoring.

  4. Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients to form a smooth paste.

Steam

  1. Turn the mixture into a buttered mold and cover with greased paper.

  2. Steam the pudding for 3 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 + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Ginger + almondtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crumbs
Provide the bulk of the pudding and absorb the liquid to form a soft, cake-like body.
Beef suet
Adds richness and fat, keeping the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
All-purpose flour
Helps bind the mixture and gives the pudding structure as it sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming, helping the pudding rise and become lighter.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, dark color, and a rich molasses-like flavor.

The step that matters

Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients to form a smooth paste. Mixing until smooth without lumps spreads the flour and leavening evenly, so the pudding rises uniformly and has an even texture rather than dense pockets.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, flour, beef, milk, almond):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, beef, milk, almond. 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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