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Currant Puddings

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Currant Puddings

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour a sweet custard over squares of stale sponge cake and stir in ripe currants. Serve immediately.

  2. Stir ripe currants into a rich batter made with eggs, sweet cream, and baking powder. Pour into a buttered basin and steam for 1 hour.

  3. Layer toasted and buttered bread with sweetened ripe currants in a basin. Pour enough water to moisten the bread and bake for 1 hour. Serve with sweetened cream.

  4. Make a sweet Johnny cake using plenty of eggs and butter. Bake in a pan over 1 inch thick. Split while hot, butter both pieces, and add a layer of currants that have been sugared for an hour.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, butter, bread, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

More currant pudding recipes

Boiled 18Steamed 5Apple 3Black 3Raspberry 3Red 3 See all 60 →

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