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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding

A baked pudding made with flour, butter, eggs, sugar, raisins, currants, cream, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks, then mix in the cream and flour.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Stir in the fruit.

Cook

  1. Turn the mixture into a buttered mold.

  2. Boil for 2½ 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it sets.
Butter
Creams with the sugar to add richness and a tender texture.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whites are folded in to lighten it.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps cream the butter to a light base.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture to the finished pudding.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit flavor and small pockets of chewiness.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air bubbles that lighten the batter. Stirring them in vigorously knocks out that air and leaves a dense pudding, so fold gently until just combined.

Swap the currant

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

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

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