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Dessert

Cherry Puddings a LA Royal

A steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, egg yolks, cinnamon, cloves, soaked bread, egg whites, cherries, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Cherry Puddings a LA Royal

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix butter and powdered sugar for 30 minutes.

  2. Add egg yolks, cinnamon, and ground cloves.

  3. Soak bread in milk for 15 minutes, strain, and mix with batter for 15 minutes.

Finish and steam

  1. Fold in whipped egg whites and pitted cherries.

  2. Steam mixture in a mold for 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For sauce, strain stewed cherries through a sieve, add sugar and port wine, and boil together.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the pudding a rich, tender texture.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in to lighten the mixture and give it a risen, airy structure.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter as it sets during steaming.
Bread
Soaked in milk to form a soft body that gives the pudding its crumb and moisture.
Cherries
Add fruit flavour and moisture to the pudding, and form the base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Egg whites hold air only if whipped stiff and folded gently. Overmixing deflates them, so the steamed pudding turns dense rather than light.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Cardamomfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, cinnamon, bread, milk, port wine. 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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