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Dessert

Orange Pudding

A sweet pudding made with oranges, lemon, suet, flour, baking soda, brown sugar, and treacle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Grate the rind of the oranges and lemon.

  2. Mix the grated rind with the brown sugar, suet, flour, and baking soda.

Combine and boil

  1. Heat the treacle and add the juice of the oranges and lemon.

  2. Combine the mixtures and boil in a well-greased mold for three 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten structure that holds the pudding together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic citrus juice to release gas that lightens the pudding.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a moist, caramel-like flavor to the pudding.
Treacle
Contributes sweetness, depth of flavor and moisture.
Oranges
Their juice adds acidity and citrus aroma, and their rind adds fragrant oils.

The step that matters

Boiling for three hours in the greased mold. The mold must stay submerged in steadily simmering water for the full three hours so the batter cooks evenly through. If the water boils dry or drops too low, the pudding cooks unevenly and can stick, so the greasing also matters for an easy release.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, flour, 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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