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Dessert

Fig Pudding

A sweet pudding made with butter, sugar, bread crumbs, figs, molasses, lemon, eggs, and flour, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fig Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the eggs and stir until light.

  3. Mix in the molasses and the other ingredients in the order listed.

Cook

  1. Boil for 3 hours.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + figtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together374 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Lemon + figtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture when creamed with sugar.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the pudding its structure.
Bread crumbs
Provide the bulk and body that hold the pudding together.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the butter cream to a light base.
Figs
Add fruity sweetness and visible texture throughout the pudding.
Flour
Adds a little structure so the mixture holds its shape while cooking.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar. Beating butter with sugar traps air in the fat, which gives a lighter, more even crumb. If it is only briefly mixed, the pudding can turn out dense and heavy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, sugar, egg, fig, molasses, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, sugar, egg, fig, molasses, flour. 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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