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Dessert

Steamed Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with egg, sugar, milk, butter, flour, baking powder, and fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Steamed Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the egg with sugar, milk, butter, flour, and baking powder until smooth.

  2. Cover the bottom of a pudding dish with preserved fruit.

  3. Pour the batter over the fruit.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for 35 minutes.

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

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it sets during steaming.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the pudding as the starch sets with heat.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise and turn light.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the batter form a smooth, pourable mixture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps tenderize the crumb.

The step that matters

Steam for 35 minutes. Steam must be kept steady so the batter cooks through and rises evenly. If the steam drops, the pudding can turn heavy or stay raw in the centre.

Swap the currant

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

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

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