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Fruit Pudding

A meat pudding made with minced meat, bread crumbs, suet, citron, vanilla, and eggs, cooked slowly in a double boiler.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the mince meat in water for 20 minutes.

  2. Let it cool, then add the beaten eggs, browned bread crumbs, chopped suet, citron, and vanilla.

  3. Cook or steam in a double boiler for 2½ hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with lemon sauce, hot or cold.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  2. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Bread + vanillatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together497 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Meat + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Egg and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 27,347 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
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and add body, giving the pudding a light, crumbly texture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Mince meat
Forms the base of the pudding, providing the main body and savoury-sweet flavour.

The step that matters

Cook gently in a double boiler. Steaming in a double boiler heats the pudding gently and evenly, so the egg sets without curdling or drying out. Overheating can make the texture tough or grainy.

Swap the vanilla

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Datesfits better
  3. Pumpkinfits better
  4. Vanillathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg, bread. 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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