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Dessert

Oatmeal Pudding

A steamed pudding made with milk, oatmeal, suet, raisins, currants, sugar, salt, nutmeg, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

Oatmeal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Scald the milk and pour it hot over the oatmeal.

  2. Stir, cover, and let it sit overnight.

Mix and bag

  1. Beat the eggs and stir them into the mixture with the other ingredients.

  2. Lay a pudding cloth in a bowl and pour the pudding mixture into it.

  3. Tie the cloth tight, leaving little room for swelling.

Boil

  1. Prepare a kettle of boiling water.

  2. Plunge it into the boiling water, cover, and boil for two hours, replenishing with boiling water as needed.

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 + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

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

  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. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Oatmeal
Absorbs the hot milk and forms the bulk of the pudding's body.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as it cooks.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds to its soft, tender texture.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth tight. Pudding swells as it cooks, so leaving little room lets it expand without the cloth bursting open. A loose cloth can let water in and the pudding fall apart.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, raisin, sugar, nutmeg, 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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