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Dessert

Steamed Pudding

A steamed pudding made with eggs, sugar, butter, milk, flour, baking powder, and fruit, topped with a hard butter-sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the sugar, butter, and milk.

  2. Add the flour and baking powder, and mix until smooth.

Assemble and steam

  1. Grease a mold that holds at least 3 quarts and layer the bottom with fruit.

  2. Pour the pudding mixture over the fruit.

  3. Steam for 1 hour.

Make the hard sauce

  1. For the hard sauce, cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Add the beaten egg and mix well, then add flavoring to taste.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as the pudding sets.
Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as the batter sets during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the pudding rises and turns light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the pudding and the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps make the hard sauce creamy.

“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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