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Dessert

Plain Ginger Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, flour, sugar, molasses, ginger, nutmeg, milk, and water, lined with raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Ginger Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grease a melon mold and line it with raisins.

Make and steam the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix the suet, flour, salt, brown sugar, molasses, baking powder, ground ginger, nutmeg, sweet milk, and cold water until well combined.

  2. Pour the batter into the prepared mold.

  3. Steam the pudding for 2½ 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Ginger + raisintop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Provides fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming so the pudding rises and becomes light.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and a moist, rich texture.
Ground ginger
Supplies the warm, spicy aroma that defines the pudding.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, molasses, nutmeg, milk, raisin. 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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