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Dessert

Oatmeal Pudding

A sweet, creamy pudding made with milk, oatmeal, raisins, currants, sugar, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Oatmeal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Warm the milk in a pot.

  2. Soak the oatmeal in the warm milk for at least 2 hours.

Make the pudding

  1. Add the raisins, currants, salt, sugar, and butter to the soaked oatmeal.

  2. Mix well and either bake or boil until cooked through.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

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

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Softens the oatmeal and forms the moist base of the pudding.
Whole oatmeal
Provides the bulk and starchy body that sets as the pudding cooks.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture through the pudding.
Currants
Add tart, concentrated fruit flavour and chewy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning when the pudding is baked.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist crumb.

The step that matters

Soaking the oatmeal. Soaking for at least two hours lets the oats fully hydrate and soften, so the finished pudding cooks evenly and has a tender rather than gritty texture.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, raisin, sugar, butter. 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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