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Dessert

Charleston Pudding

A fruit and suet pudding with apples, raisins, and brandy, baked in a greased dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Charleston Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

Make the batter

  1. In another bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar, butter, and heavy cream until well combined.

  2. Gently stir the flour mixture into the egg mixture.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the 5 eggs with ½ pound of sugar.

  4. Chop the suet and apples together, then stir into the egg mixture.

  5. Add ½ pound of flour, raisins, brandy, and grated nutmeg; mix well.

  6. Fold in the beaten egg whites until stiff peaks form.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased baking dish and bake for 2 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Apple + brandytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it sets.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set into a firm, tender crumb when baked.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to release gas and help it rise.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and works with baking soda to help it rise.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps it brown during baking.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites until stiff peaks form.. Folding gently keeps the air whipped into the whites. Overmixing deflates them, which reduces the lift the batter gets in the oven.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

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