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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding

A baked pudding made with flour, shortening, eggs, sugar, raisins, currants, cream, lemon, and jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the pudding

  1. Cream the Cottolene and sugar together.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks, then the cream or milk, and the lemon juice and rind.

  3. Stir in the beaten egg whites and mix everything together.

Bake and serve

  1. Spread a thick layer of jam at the bottom of a baking dish.

  2. Pour the pudding mixture over the jam.

  3. Bake for 20 minutes.

  4. Top with meringue, brown it, and serve cold with sugar and wine.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking, giving the pudding its body and structure.
Cottolene
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps brown the meringue topping.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Beaten whites trap air that lifts the batter; overmixing deflates them, leaving a dense pudding instead of a light one.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, egg, sugar, raisin, cream, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, sugar, raisin, cream, lemon. 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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