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Dessert

Steamed Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sugar, water, raisins, currants, butter, flour, spices, and served with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Steamed Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Combine sugar, water, raisins, currants, butter, flour, allspice, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl and mix until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

Steam

  1. Steam for 3 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, mix 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, and the beaten egg yolk until smooth.

  2. Serve the pudding warm with the sauce drizzled on top.

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. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Currant + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,359 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the steamed pudding its body.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and carries flavor through the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts to release gas, helping the pudding rise and become lighter.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps keep it moist, and forms the sauce base.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce, adding body and helping it become smooth and thick.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and a chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam for 3 hours. Steaming cooks the batter gently and evenly without drying it out. The water must keep simmering throughout, because if the steam drops the pudding can turn dense and unevenly cooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

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