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Dessert

Apple and Brown-bread Pudding

A pudding made with brown bread crumbs, apples, suet, raisins, egg, flour, milk, and served with lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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

Prepare

  1. In a large bowl, mix together the brown bread crumbs and chopped apples.

  2. Add the finely chopped suet, raisins, egg, flour, salt, and milk, then mix well.

  3. Grease molds with butter and fill them with the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the molds for about 2 hours.

  2. Serve the pudding with a lemon-flavored 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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 and egg to hold it together.
Egg
Binds the crumbs, apples and raisins so the pudding sets firm when cooked.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Apples
Add moisture and a fresh, tart sweetness that lightens the dense crumb.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the molds for about 2 hours. Gentle, steady boiling cooks the egg and crumb mixture through so it sets into a cohesive pudding. Letting the water boil too hard or run low can leave the molds uneven or the pudding dense and undercooked in the centre.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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