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Dessert

Orange Pudding

A steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, flour, ground rice, eggs, orange rind, and orange juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Orange Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Add the flour, sugar, and ground rice.

  3. Moisten the mixture with the beaten eggs.

  4. Stir in the orange rind and juice, then add the baking powder.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered mold.

  2. Steam for 1½ 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Orange + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Butter
Adds richness and a tender, moist crumb to the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during steaming.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps create a soft, tender texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas to lift the batter so the pudding rises and stays light.
Orange rind
Contributes fragrant citrus aroma and flavour to the pudding.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture into a well-buttered mold. Thorough buttering keeps the delicate, steamed pudding from sticking, so it unmolds intact. Adding the baking powder just before steaming matters because its lift fades if the batter waits too long.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, rice, 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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