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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding

A steamed custard pudding made with milk, eggs, sugar, butter, stale sponge cake, raisins, currants, and citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs, sugar, and salt together in a bowl.

  2. Add the milk and mix well.

Assemble and steam

  1. Sprinkle a pudding mold with cake crumbs, then add a layer of fruit, followed by more cake crumbs. Repeat until all ingredients are used.

  2. Pour the custard mixture over the layered ingredients.

  3. Let it stand for 2 hours.

  4. Steam for 1½ 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and bind it into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Stale sponge cake
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the custard.
Milk
Makes the liquid custard that moistens and coats the cake.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture in the layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds flavour.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. Steam gently and keep the water at a steady simmer so the egg custard sets evenly. Boiling vigorously or letting the water run low can leave the pudding rough, holey, or undercooked in the centre.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, raisin, sugar, butter, egg. 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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