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Dessert

Delhi Pudding

A steamed apple pudding made with suet, currants, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg 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 ↓

Delhi Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Core and slice the apples.

  2. Combine apples, sugar, nutmeg, and lemon peel in a saucepan.

  3. Cook over medium heat until the apples are soft.

Make and fill the pastry

  1. Make a suet paste.

  2. Roll the suet paste out to a proper thickness.

  3. Spread the cooked apples over the suet paste.

  4. Sprinkle currants over the apples.

  5. Roll the pudding up.

  6. Seal the ends tightly.

Cook

  1. Steam or 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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the moist, tart fruit filling that softens and flavours the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat to the paste, keeping it tender and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the structure of the suet paste so it can be rolled and hold the filling.
Currants
Add small pockets of sweetness and chewy texture through the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them soften into a cohesive filling.

The step that matters

Seal the ends tightly. If the roll is not sealed, steam and filling can escape or water can enter during steaming or boiling, making the pudding soggy and uneven.

Swap the currant

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

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

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