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Dessert

Orange Marmalade Pudding

A steamed pudding made with wholemeal bread, orange marmalade, milk, eggs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Orange Marmalade Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Thoroughly butter a pudding mold.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Cut the bread into slices.

  2. Butter each slice.

  3. Arrange the bread and butter in the mold in layers.

  4. Spread each layer with marmalade.

  5. Beat the eggs with the milk.

  6. Pour the mixture over the layers.

  7. Let the mixture soak for 1 hour.

Steam and serve

  1. Cover the mold tightly.

  2. Steam the pudding for 1½ hours.

  3. Dip the mold in cold water for 1 minute before turning it out.

  4. Serve with white sauce.

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

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Wholemeal bread
Forms the layers that soak up the custard and hold the pudding's structure.
Eggs
Set with the milk during steaming to give the pudding a firm, custard-like body.
Milk
Soaks into the bread and, with the eggs, forms the custard that binds the layers.
Orange marmalade
Adds sweetness and bright citrus flavour between the bread layers.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the bread and keeps it from sticking to the mold.

The step that matters

Let the mixture soak for 1 hour. The bread needs time to absorb the egg and milk custard. Without soaking, dry patches remain and the pudding can set unevenly during steaming.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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