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Dessert

A Treacle Pudding

A sweet pudding made with suet, flour, treacle, pounded loaf sugar, lemon juice, and milk, boiled for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Treacle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the suet, flour, treacle, pounded loaf sugar, and lemon juice.

  2. Add enough milk to form a thick batter.

Boil the pudding

  1. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth, leaving room for it to swell.

  2. Boil the pudding for three 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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich, moist and tender as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the structure that sets as the pudding cooks and holds the batter together.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, dark colour and moisture with a deep, rich flavour.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the dry ingredients into a thick batter.

The step that matters

Leave room in the cloth for swelling. The pudding expands as it heats and its starch sets. If the cloth is tied too tightly, the pressure can squeeze the pudding, making it dense or causing the cloth to burst.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, milk. 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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