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Dessert

Steamed Cup Pudding

A steamed pudding made with a batter of egg, flour, baking powder, milk, and fruit, served with a lemon butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Steamed Cup Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine the egg, flour, baking powder, and enough milk to create a thick batter.

  2. Grease cups with butter and fill each with a spoonful of batter.

Fill and steam

  1. Add a layer of fruit, then top with more batter until the cup is filled.

  2. Place the cups in a steamer and steam for one hour.

Make the lemon dressing and serve

  1. For the lemon dressing, melt the butter, then stir in the sugar, flour, beaten egg, grated lemon, and boiling water.

  2. Boil the mixture until thick and serve over the pudding.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 bulk of the batter and gives the pudding its structure as it sets.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps it set firm during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the pudding rises and turns light.
Milk
Adds moisture so the flour and egg form a thick, spoonable batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the lemon dressing and helps it thicken as it boils.

The step that matters

Steaming the cups. Steam must stay steady and the cups must not be overfilled, since the batter rises as the baking powder releases gas. Too little steam leaves the pudding dense and undercooked in the centre.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Milletfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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