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Dessert

English Fruit Pudding

A boiled pudding made with currants, raisins, suet, bread, eggs, sugar, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg.

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 ↓

English Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Crumb the soft part of the bread.

  2. Soak the crust in boiling milk.

  3. Beat the eggs and combine all ingredients in a bowl.

  4. Mix thoroughly with your hands.

Boil

  1. Take a piece of cotton cloth, lay it over a cup, and put the pudding into the cloth, tying it down tightly.

  2. Place in boiling water and boil for 5 hours, adding more 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. Currant + raisintop 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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the pudding its set structure.
Stale or soaked bread
Provides the body of the pudding and absorbs moisture from the other ingredients.
Suet
Adds fat that gives a rich, tender texture as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth tightly. A loose cloth lets the pudding swell and spread unevenly, and water can seep in and make it soggy. A firm, snug wrap holds the shape while it boils.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, bread, egg, nutmeg. 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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