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Dessert

Treacle Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, breadcrumbs, treacle, lemon rind, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,404 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Treacle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pastry

  1. Mix the flour, suet, baking powder, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add cold water to form a stiff paste.

  3. Divide the paste into two equal portions.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Line a pudding basin with one portion of the paste.

  2. Cut off enough paste from the second portion to form a lid and roll it out thinly.

  3. Add a layer of treacle to the basin, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and lemon rind.

  4. Cut a round from the rolled-out paste to cover the treacle, moisten edges with water, and seal it to the basin.

  5. Repeat layering with treacle, breadcrumbs, and lemon rind, then cover with pastry.

Steam

  1. Cover the basin with greased paper and steam for 2 to 3 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 + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

  3. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the suet pastry that encloses the filling.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pastry rich and tender during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the pastry as it steams.
Treacle
Provides sweetness, flavour and moisture to the filling.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the treacle and add body to the filling layers.

The step that matters

Sealing the pastry lid. If the edges are not moistened and sealed to the basin, steam and treacle can escape or leak out and the pudding can turn out dry or messy. A tight seal keeps moisture in during the long steaming.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread. 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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