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Dessert

Apple and Brown Bread Pudding

A steamed pudding made from brown bread crumbs, apples, raisins, suet, flour, sugar, milk, and buttered molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple and Brown Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the brown bread crumbs and chopped apples in a bowl.

  2. Add the finely chopped suet, brown sugar, raisins mixed with flour, and salt.

  3. Pour in the milk and beat the mixture thoroughly.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam in buttered molds for two hours.

  2. Serve with lemon or vanilla sauce.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Apple + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

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

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

Brown bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and soak up the milk to hold its structure.
Egg
Binds the mixture so it sets firm after steaming.
Chopped apples
Add moisture and fruity flavour through the pudding.
Suet
Adds richness and fat, giving a moist, tender texture.
Milk
Moistens the crumbs and helps the mixture hold together.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture thoroughly. Thorough beating evenly distributes the egg, flour and milk so the crumbs absorb liquid uniformly and the pudding steams to an even, cohesive texture rather than a patchy or crumbly one.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, flour, raisin, sugar, milk. 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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