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Dessert

Weymouth Pudding

A steamed pudding made with stale bread crumbs, suet, figs, raisins, sugar, eggs, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Fig and raisin work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 737 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Weymouth Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the stale bread crumbs in hot milk.

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the soaked bread crumbs, chopped suet, chopped figs, chopped raisins, sugar, salt, eggs, lemon juice, and grated lemon rind, and beat all the ingredients well together.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered mold.

  2. Steam the pudding for 3 hours.

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. Fig + raisintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

  2. Milk + figtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + figtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together374 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk to form the body of the pudding.
Suet
Adds richness and a moist, tender texture as it melts during steaming.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help it set as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly.
Figs
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness.

The step that matters

Steam the pudding for 3 hours. Steaming must be gentle and steady so the pudding cooks through evenly without drying out. Water that boils dry or runs low lowers the steam and can leave the pudding dense or undercooked in the centre.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Datesfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, fig, raisin, sugar, 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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