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Dessert

Treacle Sponge

A boiled treacle sponge pudding made with flour, baking soda, treacle, suet, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 Sponge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the flour, baking soda, treacle, suet, and a pinch of salt together.

  2. Add enough milk to form a batter.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

Cook

  1. Boil for 3½ 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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 main structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Baking soda
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, a rich dark colour, and moisture to the sponge.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding tender and moist as it cooks.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the ingredients into a pourable batter.

The step that matters

Boil for the full 3½ hours. Steady, sustained heat sets the batter's starch and protein and lets the baking soda leaven it. Cutting the time short leaves the centre dense, gummy, and under-risen.

“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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