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Dessert

East Indian Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with bread crumbs, eggs, butter, honey, raisins, cinnamon, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

East Indian 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 the crumbs

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in cold water for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain the water and squeeze the crumbs dry.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the crumbs with softened butter, salt, cinnamon, honey, and beaten egg yolks.

  2. Add the raisins and mix well.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake in a buttered baking dish at 350°F (175°C) for 25 minutes.

  2. Spread with meringue made from egg whites, a little sugar, and lemon juice, then brown slightly.

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. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Honey + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Butter + honeytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,327 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Provide the body of the pudding, soaking up and holding the liquid and egg.
Eggs
Egg yolks bind and set the pudding, while the whites whip into the meringue topping.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, keeping the crumb tender and moist.
Honey
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the surface brown.
Raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Browning the meringue. Meringue sets and browns quickly in the oven. Brown it only slightly, because overbaking makes the sugar-egg topping dry, tough, and prone to burning.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, butter, honey, cinnamon. 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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