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Dessert

Marmalade Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, mutton suet, eggs, orange marmalade, sugar, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Marmalade Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, mutton suet, whisked eggs, orange marmalade, and sugar.

  2. Add enough milk to achieve a pancake batter consistency.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie the mixture in a cloth and place it in boiling water.

  2. Boil for 2 hours.

  3. Serve with weak sherry 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as the pudding sets.
Mutton suet
Adds fat and richness, giving the pudding a moist, tender texture.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together.
Orange marmalade
Adds sweetness, acidity and orange flavour throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth loosely and keep the water boiling. The pudding needs room to swell as it cooks, so the cloth should not be tied too tightly. Water that drops below a boil cooks the pudding unevenly and slows setting, so keep it at a steady boil for the full two hours.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, mutton, 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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