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Dessert

English Fruit-pudding

A steamed pudding made with lamb, figs, citron, lemon peel, butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Fig and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 763 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

English Fruit-pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Beat the eggs until very light and stir them into the butter and sugar mixture.

  3. Mix in the flour and grated lemon peel.

Add the fruit and steam

  1. Add the fruit: seed and halve the raisins, mince the citron, and dredge all the fruit with flour.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased mold and steam for 3 hours.

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. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Fig + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,192 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Fig + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,042 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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
Beaten eggs add structure and lift to the batter as they set.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, butter adds richness and a tender crumb.
Flour
Flour gives the pudding its body once the batter sets during steaming.
Lamb
Suet-style meat adds richness and moisture to the pudding.
Sugar
Sugar creamed with butter adds sweetness and helps give a light texture.

The step that matters

Dredging the fruit with flour. Flour-coated fruit is less likely to sink to the bottom of the batter during steaming, so pieces stay evenly distributed through the pudding.

Swap the fig

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Figthe original
  4. Orangefits about as well

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