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Dessert

Treacle Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet pastry, treacle, bread crumbs, ginger, lemon rind, and a thin paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Treacle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fill

  1. Line a buttered pudding basin with suet pastry.

  2. Fill with alternate layers of treacle, bread crumbs, ginger, lemon rind, and thin paste.

  3. Cover with a thick round of pastry.

Cook

  1. Tie a cloth over the top and boil or steam for 2.5 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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Suet pastry
Forms the sturdy outer case that holds the filling during long steaming.
Treacle
Provides sweetness, dark color, and a rich, sticky flavor to the pudding.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the treacle and lend body so the filling stays soft rather than runny.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aromatic oils that cut through the sweetness of the treacle.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth loosely over the top. The cloth must leave room for the pudding to expand while steaming and keep water out. A tight or gappy seal can let water seep in or trap pressure, spoiling the texture.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, lemon. 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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