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Dessert

English Fruit-pudding

A steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, raisins, figs, citron, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

English Fruit-pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Beat the eggs until very light and stir them into the butter-sugar mixture.

  3. Mix in the flour and grated lemon peel.

Add fruit and steam

  1. Add the prepared fruit and ensure it is well coated with flour.

  2. Grease a mold and steam the mixture 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + figtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the pudding a rich, tender body.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set during steaming.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter and suspended fruit together.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chew and moisture to the finished pudding.
Figs
Add sweetness and soft texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Coating the fruit with flour. Flour-dusted fruit is less likely to sink to the bottom of the batter, so the pieces stay spread evenly through the pudding as it steams and sets.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Datesfits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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