Skip to main content
Dessert

Portland Pudding

A boiled pudding made with eggs, flour, sugar, butter, candied peel, raisins, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Portland Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the egg whites and yolks separately.

  2. In a bowl, mix the yolks gradually with the flour until smooth.

  3. Stir in the sugar, butter, candied lemon peel, candied orange peel, salt, and grated nutmeg.

  4. Add the raisins and fold in the beaten egg whites until well combined.

  5. Beat the mixture for 5 to 6 minutes.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour into a buttered basin and tie it in a cloth, leaving room for expansion.

  2. Plunge into boiling water and boil for 5 hours until cooked through.

  3. Carefully turn out and serve with sweet 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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites trapped by beating add lightness, and yolks enrich the batter and help bind it.
Flour
Starch forms the body of the pudding and sets as it cooks, giving it structure.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps keep the pudding tender.
Clarified butter
Adds fat for richness and a soft, moist texture.
Stoned raisins
Provide chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth and boiling. The basin must be tied with room for the batter to expand, or the pudding can burst. The water must stay at a steady boil so the batter cooks evenly through, as the long steaming sets its structure.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, sugar, butter, lemon, nutmeg, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, sugar, butter, lemon, nutmeg, raisin. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes