Skip to main content
Dessert

Treacle Pudding

A sweet pudding made with treacle, lemon zest, and a suet crust, boiled and served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

Treacle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Make a crust with suet or dripping and roll it out thin.

  2. Line a basin with the crust and cut eight to ten pieces the size of the basin.

Fill the basin

  1. Grate the rind of the lemon and mix it with the juice and treacle.

  2. Pour a little treacle mixture on the crust in the basin.

  3. Place one piece of crust over the treacle, then add more treacle and crust, repeating until the basin is full.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie a floured cloth over the basin and boil for one and a half hours.

  2. Serve with melted butter and additional treacle.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Suet or dripping
Forms a rich, short crust that holds the pudding together and adds fat.
Treacle
Provides the sweet, dark, sticky filling that soaks into the layers of crust.
Lemon
Its zest and juice add aroma and a bright acidity that balances the sweetness of the treacle.

The step that matters

Tie a floured cloth over the basin. A floured cloth lets the pudding's surface form a dry skin without sticking, and a snug seal keeps boiling water out so the pudding steams rather than becomes waterlogged.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes