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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, butter, eggs, sugar, raisins, currants, milk, and lemon.

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 ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks, then mix in the milk and flour alternately with the beaten egg whites.

  3. Stir in the fruit, well dredged with flour.

  4. Beat the mixture thoroughly and pour it into a buttered mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Place the mold into a pot of boiling water, ensuring it maintains a boil for 2.5 hours.

  2. Dip the mold into cold water for a moment before turning it out.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 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).

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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, beaten in, lighten it and help it set.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender texture to the pudding.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Sugar
Creamed with butter, it sweetens the pudding and helps give it a soft crumb.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture to the finished pudding.
Currants
Add tart, concentrated fruitiness and moisture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Keeping the water boiling during steaming. Steaming needs a steady, continuous boil for the full 2.5 hours. If the water drops below a boil, the pudding cooks unevenly and may turn out dense or undercooked in the middle.

Swap the currant

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

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

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