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Dessert

Steamed Cherry Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sour milk, butter, sugar, eggs, baking soda, flour, and canned cherries, served with a cherry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 Cherry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the sour milk, butter, sugar, and beaten eggs.

  2. Add baking soda and enough flour to create a stiff batter.

  3. Fold in the canned cherries.

Steam the pudding

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold and steam for 1½ hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, combine sugar, butter, and flour in a saucepan.

  2. Add boiling water and cherry juice, stirring until smooth and thickened.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + cherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together851 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to lift and soften the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce gas that makes the pudding rise.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the cooked pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and a rich flavour in both pudding and sauce.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the pudding its body; thickens the sauce when cooked.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and sauce and helps keep the crumb tender.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce while adding the boiling liquid. Flour mixed into fat and then hit with hot liquid clumps easily. Stirring while the liquid goes in spreads the starch evenly, so the sauce thickens smooth rather than lumpy.

Swap the cherry

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

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

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