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Dessert

Marrow Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with stale bread crumbs, milk, clarified fat, raisins, sugar, nutmeg, and eggs, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

Marrow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crumbs

  1. Rub stale bread through a wire sieve to make ½ pint of fine crumbs.

  2. Pour 1½ pints of boiling milk over the crumbs and soak for a while.

Make the mixture

  1. While still hot, add ¼ pound of clarified fat, ¼ pound of raisins, sugar, and nutmeg. Beat the mixture until the fat is melted.

  2. Stir in 4 eggs.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the pudding into a buttered mold and boil 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. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  5. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Soaks the crumbs and makes the pudding moist and soft.
Clarified fat
Adds richness and a tender texture as it melts into the mixture.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy bits throughout the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding in the mold. Eggs set when heated, so the pudding needs a steady, gentle boil for the full time. Too little heat or time leaves it loose and wet in the centre, while a vigorous boil can make the texture rubbery or crack the set.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinthe original
  4. Lemonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, nutmeg, egg. 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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