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Dessert

Economical Ginger Pudding

A pudding made from soaked bread, suet, sugar, treacle, and ginger, boiled for an hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Economical Ginger Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Soak the bread in water until soft.

  2. Squeeze it dry and beat with a fork until fine.

  3. Add the suet, sugar, and ginger, and mix with the treacle.

Cook

  1. Boil in a greased basin for 1 hour.

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 + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  2. Bread + gingertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

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

  3. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Bread scraps
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up moisture and holding its shape.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding tender and moist as it cooks.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, moisture and a dark, rich colour and flavour.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding moist.
Ground ginger
Adds warm, spicy aroma and flavour.

The step that matters

Squeezing the bread dry. Bread that stays too wet dilutes the mixture and makes the pudding heavy and soggy. Squeezing removes excess water so the bread absorbs the fat and treacle evenly and the pudding sets with a light, cohesive texture.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Clovefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar. 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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