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Dessert

Steamed Cabinet Pudding

A steamed pudding made with butter, fruit, stale cake or bread crumbs, eggs, sugar, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Steamed Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Grease a 3-pint pudding mold with butter.

  2. Sprinkle half of the fruit in the mold.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the remaining fruit with the stale cake or bread crumbs and fill the mold lightly.

  2. Whip the eggs, then add sugar and milk, and pour over the cake and fruit mixture.

  3. Let it stand for 1 hour, then steam for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with creamy 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 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

Eggs
Set the custard and bind the crumbs and fruit into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Stale cake or bread crumbs
Absorb the custard and provide the body of the pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid custard that soaks the crumbs and sets with the eggs.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the richness of the eggs and milk.
Fruit
Adds sweetness, chewy texture and flavour pockets throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture stand before steaming. Standing gives the dry crumbs time to absorb the egg and milk custard evenly. Without this soaking, the pudding can turn out wet in patches or uneven once steamed, because the custard sets around unsoaked crumbs.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, egg, sugar, 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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