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Dessert

Steamed Prune Pudding

A steamed pudding made with bread crumbs, sugar, flour, eggs, prune pulp, milk, suet or butter, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Steamed Prune Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix all ingredients together thoroughly.

  2. Pour the mixture into a mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for two and a half hours.

  2. Serve with a hard or creamy 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set, with moisture from their liquid.
Flour
Provides starch that sets with the eggs to give the pudding its body.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the moist batter, lightening the pudding as it steams.
Prune pulp
Adds moisture, dark color, and concentrated sweetness with a rich fruity flavor.
Suet or butter
Adds fat, which coats flour particles and keeps the pudding tender and rich.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding moist and tender.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. The mold must be sealed and the water kept steadily simmering so steam surrounds it. Low or uneven steam lets the pudding cook unevenly, leaving it dense or soggy in the middle.

“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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