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Dessert

A Sweetmeat Pudding

A sweet pudding made from puff pastry layered with marmalade, boiled, and finished with a butter‑sugar‑wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Sweetmeat Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pastry

  1. Make a quart of flour into puff pastry.

  2. Divide the pastry into three unequal parts.

Layer and fold

  1. Roll the largest part into a square, about ¼ inch thick, and spread a thin layer of marmalade, leaving a 1‑inch margin.

  2. Roll the next largest part similarly, place it on top, and cover with marmalade, leaving a margin.

  3. Roll the smallest part and place it on top of the other two, spreading more marmalade.

  4. Fold the pastry over itself, one fold over the other, about the width of your hand.

Boil and serve

  1. Press the ends together, tie it securely in a cloth, and place it in a kettle of boiling water, ensuring it lies flat.

  2. Boil quickly, and when done, pour melted butter mixed with sugar and wine over the pudding.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + winetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the pastry dough that gives the pudding its structure and body.
Marmalade
Adds sweetness and a fruity, slightly acidic flavour between the pastry layers.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, moistening the pudding when poured over it.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the buttery sauce poured over the finished pudding.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the sauce poured over the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep the pudding flat and tied securely while boiling. If the wrapped pudding is not pressed flat and tightly tied, water can seep in and the layers may separate or become waterlogged as it cooks in the boiling water.

“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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