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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding

A sweet pudding made with flour, butter, eggs, sugar, raisins, currants, milk, lemon, and cooked for 2½ hours.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks, then mix in the milk and flour alternately with the beaten egg whites.

  3. Stir in the fruit that has been dredged with flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil for 2½ hours.

  2. Serve hot with 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. 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter, while whites trap air and help the pudding set and rise.
Flour
Its starch sets during cooking, giving the pudding its body and structure.
Butter
Creaming it with sugar traps air and adds richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, creamed with butter, helps lighten the batter.
Raisins
Add sweetness and a chewy texture to the pudding.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture, keeping the pudding soft and loosening the batter.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites with the flour and milk. The air in beaten egg whites is what lightens the pudding. Mixing gently and alternating with flour and milk keeps that air in, while overmixing deflates the batter and leaves a heavy pudding.

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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