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Dessert

Treacle Pudding

A steamed pudding made with grated bread, flour, currants, suet, treacle, and spices, served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Treacle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Wash and dry the currants.

  2. In a bowl, combine the grated bread, flour, sugar, currants, suet, salt, ginger, carbonate of soda, and cream of tartar. Mix well.

  3. Add the treacle and stir.

  4. Beat the egg and mix it with the water. Pour the egg-water mixture into the pudding mixture and combine thoroughly.

  5. Check that the mixture is moist but not sloppy.

Steam and serve

  1. Grease a pudding basin with butter. Pour the mixture into the basin.

  2. Cover the basin with buttered paper. Place the basin in a pot with ½ inch of boiling water. Cover the pot.

  3. Steam for 2.5 hours. Turn out the pudding.

  4. Serve with sweet 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist and gives a tender texture.
Egg
Binds the ingredients together and adds structure as the pudding sets.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar and treacle to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Treacle
Adds deep sweetness and a dark color and flavor to the pudding.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Checking the batter consistency. The mixture should be moist but not sloppy. Too much liquid can make the pudding heavy and wet, while too little can leave it dry and dense, since the flour and grated bread absorb moisture as they steam.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, sugar, ginger, cream, 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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