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Dessert

Quaking Pudding

A bread pudding made with stale bread, currants, raisins, milk, eggs, sugar, butter, and spices, served with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Quaking Pudding

Why it works: Raisin and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

Quaking Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a 3‑quart bowl thoroughly and sprinkle the bottom and sides with currants.

  2. Layer the bread in the bowl, adding raisins between layers and finishing with bread on top.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, sugar, salt, and nutmeg together, then add the milk and pour over the bread.

  4. Place the bowl in a cool place for 3 hours.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam in a steamer for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. For the sauce, beat the butter until creamy, gradually adding the powdered sugar.

  3. Once light and creamy, add the vanilla or lemon and cream a little at a time until smooth.

  4. Keep the sauce warm in a basin of hot water until ready to serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the custard and help set the bread into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard to hold its shape.
Milk
Forms the liquid custard that soaks the bread and gives a soft, tender texture.
Raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness between the bread layers.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savory-leaning richness of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Steam in a steamer for 1 hour and 15 minutes.. Steam heats the custard gently and evenly, so the eggs set into a smooth, tender pudding. Too much heat or boiling water can make the egg curdle and the texture grainy or rubbery.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, raisin, sugar, nutmeg, milk, egg, 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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