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Dessert

Pudding, Delhi

A boiled apple pudding with suet crust, currants, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pudding, Delhi

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Pare, core, and slice the apples.

  2. In a saucepan, combine apples, nutmeg, lemon peel, and sugar; stew until soft.

Assemble and cook

  1. Roll out the suet crust thinly.

  2. Spread the stewed apples over the crust and sprinkle with currants.

  3. Roll the pudding up, sealing the ends, and tie it in a floured cloth.

  4. Boil for 2 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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the bulk of the filling and, once stewed, a soft, moist fruit layer.
Suet crust
Forms the rich, tender pastry wrapper that holds the filling during boiling.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them stew into a soft, flavourful mass.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.
Lemon peel
Adds bright aromatic oils that cut through the sweetness of the filling.

The step that matters

Sealing the ends when rolling the pudding. If the ends are not sealed well, water and filling can escape into the cloth during boiling, leaving the pudding soggy and dry in the middle.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, nutmeg, lemon, sugar):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, nutmeg, lemon, sugar. 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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