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Dessert

Cumberland Pudding with Rum Sauce

A steamed pudding made with suet, currants, apples, citron, bread crumbs, eggs, and served with a rum sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Cumberland Pudding with Rum Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Combine suet, currants, apples, citron, orange rind, lemon rind, bread crumbs, eggs, sugar, and salt in a bowl and mix thoroughly.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a buttered mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Place the mold in a saucepan with boiling water, ensuring the water reaches two-thirds up the sides of the mold.

  2. Steam for 3 hours.

  3. Carefully turn the pudding out of the mold.

  4. Dust with powdered sugar.

  5. Serve with Rum Sauce.

Make the rum sauce

  1. For the Rum Sauce, melt 2 oz of sugar in a saucepan with the lemon juice and ⅓ cup boiling water.

  2. Stir in the rum.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  3. Apple + rumtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together214 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  4. Currant + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Orange + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together801 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set to give the pudding its structure.
Bread crumbs
Provide the body of the pudding and soak up moisture and fat.
Suet
Adds richness and fat that keeps the steamed pudding moist and tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding its flavour.
Currants
Add chewy texture and concentrated fruity sweetness.
Rum
Adds aroma and warmth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Steam at a steady simmer with water two-thirds up the mold. Water that boils too hard or sits too low can cool or dry the pudding unevenly. Steady, gentle steam cooks the egg-thickened batter through evenly, so it sets firm and moist rather than cracking or going dense at the edges.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, apple, sugar, egg, orange, lemon, rum):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, apple, sugar, egg, orange, lemon, rum. 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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