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Dessert

Newcastle Pudding

A steamed pudding made with stale bread, butter, sugar, lemon, custard, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Newcastle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter the inside of a 1‑pint basin.

  2. Fill it with thin slices of stale bread and butter, sprinkled with white sugar and grated lemon.

Make the custard

  1. Make a custard by mixing ½ pint of milk with 2 well‑beaten eggs and flavoring with lemon.

  2. Pour the custard over the bread.

Steam and serve

  1. Lay a buttered paper on top and steam gently for about 1 hour.

  2. Carefully turn out and serve with fruit or lemon syrup.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 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 so it holds its shape when turned out.
Stale bread
Forms the structure of the pudding, soaking up the custard as it steams.
Milk
Makes up the liquid custard that binds and moistens the bread.
Butter
Adds richness and keeps the bread from sticking to the basin.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to the bread layers and custard.

The step that matters

Steam gently. High heat or boiling can make the egg custard curdle and turn grainy or watery. Gentle steam sets the eggs smoothly while the bread absorbs the custard evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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