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Dessert

Steamed Orange Pudding

A steamed pudding made from milk, bread crumbs, eggs, sugar, orange rind and juice, lemon juice, butter, and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Steamed Orange Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Pour milk over grated bread crumbs and add butter.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 15 minutes.

Make the pudding

  1. Beat eggs with sugar.

  2. Add grated orange rind and juice of orange and lemon.

  3. Stir the egg mixture into the bread mixture.

  4. Add chopped nuts.

  5. Turn the mixture into buttered timbale molds.

  6. Steam for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with hard 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the pudding into a tender custard-like structure as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and give the pudding its body and soft texture.
Milk
Moistens the bread crumbs and adds richness and tenderness to the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the citrus acidity.
Orange juice and rind
Add bright citrus aroma and flavor, with the juice adding moisture.

The step that matters

Turn the mixture into buttered timbale molds. Buttering the molds keeps the delicate steamed pudding from sticking, so it releases cleanly when unmolded. Filling them evenly also helps the pudding cook at the same rate.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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