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Dessert

Cracker Pudding

A sweet pudding made with crackers, milk, suet, raisins, sugar, eggs, and a lemon‑sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Cracker Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pudding

  1. Soak the crackers in the milk.

  2. In a bowl, combine soaked crackers, suet, raisins, sugar, egg yolks, salt, and cinnamon.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1.5 hours.

Make the topping and sauce

  1. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy, then gradually add powdered sugar and continue beating until stiff peaks form.

  2. Spread the egg white mixture on top of the pudding and return to the oven to brown.

  3. For the sauce, melt 2 cups of sugar to a syrup, then mix in lemon juice and beat until frothy.

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. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the custard-like body and help bind the pudding together.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff foam that forms a light topping which browns in the oven.
Crackers
Soak up milk to form the starchy base of the pudding.
Suet
Adds richness and fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and, melted into a syrup, forms the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet syrup sauce.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to stiff peaks. Egg whites must be beaten until stiff and sugar added gradually so the foam holds its shape and browns evenly. Under-beaten whites collapse and weep on the pudding.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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