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Dessert

Biscuit Pudding

A steamed pudding made from crumbled sponge cake, cream, eggs, sugar, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Biscuit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the cream and pour it over the crumbled sponge cake. Let it steep for a few minutes.

  2. Add the powdered sugar, eggs, and lemon rind to the mixture. Mix well.

Steam and serve

  1. Grease a mold with butter and pour the mixture into it.

  2. Steam the pudding for about 1 hour.

  3. Once done, serve with custard sauce poured over it.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sponge cake
Forms the bulk of the pudding and soaks up the cream to give it body.
Heavy cream
Moistens the crumbled cake and makes the pudding rich and tender.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during steaming to give the pudding structure.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the warm cream mixture.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. Steam gently and keep the water at a steady simmer so the eggs set evenly. Too much heat can make the pudding rough or spongy, while too little leaves the centre wet.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, 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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