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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding

A baked pudding made with sponge cake, fruit, milk, and eggs, served with a butter and sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mould

  1. Grease a mould with butter.

  2. Line the mould with a layer of sponge cake.

  3. Add a layer of chopped citron, raisins, currants, and your choice of spices.

  4. Repeat with more cake and more fruit until the mould is full.

Make and cook the pudding

  1. Boil 1 quart of milk and pour it hot over 8 beaten eggs.

  2. Pour the milk and egg mixture into the mould.

  3. Tie the mould in a cloth and boil for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a cold sauce made by creaming together butter and sugar.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Eggs
Set the custard, binding the milk and cake into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Milk
Forms the custard base with the eggs, keeping the pudding moist as it cooks.
Sponge cake
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard as it steams.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chew to the layers of the pudding.
Currants
Add small pops of tart sweetness and chew throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Pour the milk and egg mixture into the mould. The milk should be hot but poured over beaten eggs gently so they cook evenly without scrambling; the custard then sets slowly during boiling, so the pudding holds together.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, raisin, milk, egg, sauce, 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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