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Dessert

Banff Pudding

A Scottish bread pudding made with bread crumbs, apples, lemon, raspberry jam, and suet, baked for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and raspberry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Banff Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a paste with flour, suet, and salt.

  2. Line a basin with the paste.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix bread crumbs, lemon zest, lemon juice, chopped apples, brown sugar, raspberry jam, and salt.

  4. Pour the mixture into the lined basin.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 2½ hours.

  2. Serve with any sweet sauce.

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. Lemon + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

  2. Apple + raspberrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together282 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Forms the bulk of the filling and soaks up moisture for a soft, dense texture.
Suet
Adds fat that makes the crust rich and tender and keeps the pudding moist.
Flour
Combines with suet to form a pliable paste that holds its shape around the filling.
Brown sugar
Provides sweetness and molasses-like depth while helping keep the filling moist.
Apples
Contribute moisture and soft texture as they cook down in the filling.
Lemon
Zest adds fragrant aroma and juice adds acidity that brightens the sweet filling.

The step that matters

Lining the basin with the paste. The suet paste must form an even, unbroken layer with no thin spots or gaps. During the long boil, any opening lets water seep in and soften or spoil the filling.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, apple, flour, sugar, raspberry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, apple, flour, sugar, raspberry. 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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