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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding with Jelly Sauce

A custard bread pudding made with currants and served with a currant jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding with Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick over the currants carefully, wash them in cold water, and dry on a clean towel.

  2. Slice the stale bread.

Make and steam the pudding

  1. Butter a pudding mold, layer the bread and currants alternately, and pour over a custard made from the milk and eggs.

  2. Set the mold in a saucepan half full of boiling water, cover, and steam for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, melt 1 ounce of sugar and 2 tablespoons of currant jelly in ½ pint of boiling water.

  2. Stir in ½ teaspoon of cornstarch dissolved in ½ cup of cold water, bring to a boil, and it's ready to serve.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard, binding the bread and currants into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard while holding its shape.
Milk
Makes the liquid custard that moistens the bread and sets when steamed.
Dried currants
Add tart, concentrated fruit flavour and chewy pockets throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and contributes to the flavour of the sauce.
Currant jelly
Adds fruity sweetness and gloss to the sauce.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. Steam gently and keep the water simmering around the mold. Heat that is too hard can make the custard bubble and go spongy or watery, while too little heat leaves the eggs unset in the centre.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, 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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