Skip to main content
Dessert

Huckleberry Pudding

A sweet pudding made with molasses, spices, flour, and huckleberries, boiled and served with cream or pudding sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Huckleberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the molasses, salt, cloves, cinnamon, and baking soda dissolved in sweet milk.

  2. Add flour until the mixture reaches a pound-cake consistency.

  3. Gently fold in the huckleberries.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding mold.

  2. Boil for two and a half hours.

  3. Let it cool, then turn out for dessert.

  4. Serve with cream and sugar or pudding sauce.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Molasses + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Molasses + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Provides sweetness, dark color and a deep, rich flavor to the pudding.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses' acidity to lighten the pudding and help it rise.
Flour
Gives the pudding its structure so it holds together when turned out of the mold.
Huckleberries
Add moisture, tartness and fruity flavor that run through the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Flour sets the batter's structure. Too little leaves the pudding loose and fragile, while too much makes it dense and heavy. Aim for a pound-cake consistency before adding the berries.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, cinnamon, milk, flour. 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.

More huckleberry pudding recipes

Baked 13 See all 63 →

You might also like

Molasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipesMolasses CakeMolasses Cake90 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipes