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Dessert

Treacle Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, treacle, milk, and egg, boiled for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Treacle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the suet and batter

  1. Boil a large saucepan of water.

  2. Chop the suet finely after removing the skin.

  3. In a bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Add chopped suet and ground ginger; mix well.

  4. In another bowl, mix treacle, milk, and egg. Stir the wet mixture into the dry mixture; add more milk if needed to make it moist.

Steam and serve

  1. Grease a quart basin and pour the mixture into it, ensuring it's full. Sprinkle flour on top, cover with a cloth, and tie it tightly with string.

  2. Once the water is boiling, place the pudding in and boil for two hours.

  3. Remove the pudding from the saucepan, take off the cloth, and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Ginger + milktop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,519 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

Flour and milk 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as it sets during steaming.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the pudding rises.
Treacle
Adds sweetness and a deep, dark flavor while keeping the pudding moist.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps give the pudding its set structure.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth tightly over the basin. A loose cover lets steam and water seep into the batter, making the pudding soggy. A tight seal keeps moisture in and the pudding evenly cooked during the long steam.

Swap the ginger

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, 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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