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Dessert

Date Pudding

A steamed or boiled pudding made with dates, suet, flour, salt, and milk or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Date Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl.

  2. Add enough milk or water to moisten the mixture slightly.

  3. Turn the mixture into a well-greased basin.

Cook

  1. Steam or boil for 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Or form into a roll, enclose in a cloth, and boil gently for about 1½ 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Dates + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Dates + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Stoned and chopped dates
Provide sweetness and moisture, and give the pudding its characteristic flavour.
Finely chopped suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together once it is set by cooking.
Milk or water
Hydrates the flour and binds the mixture into a cohesive dough.

The step that matters

Adding the liquid. Add the milk or water gradually. Flour absorbs liquid as it sits, so too much makes the mixture heavy and dense after steaming. Stop once it is only slightly moistened and holds together.

Swap the dates

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk. 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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