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Marrow Pudding

A pudding made from grated bread, hot milk, eggs, beef marrow, lemon juice, mace, nectarine extract, rose water, and optional raisins and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Marrow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Grate the loaf of bread and pour the boiling hot milk over the crumbs.

  2. Once the mixture is cold, add the eggs, beef's marrow, lemon juice with mace, extract of nectarine, and rose-water.

Finish and cook

  1. Stir in the raisins and blanched almonds if desired.

  2. Boil the mixture for 3 hours.

  3. Alternatively, you can omit the fruit and use 1 pound of marrow instead of ½ pound and bake it.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Milk + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  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

Baker's bread
Forms the body of the pudding by soaking up the hot milk and eggs.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it as it cooks, giving it structure.
Beef's marrow
Adds richness and fat, giving the pudding a moist, tender texture.
Milk
Provides moisture and softens the bread so the mixture blends evenly.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture where included.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling milk over the crumbs and let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Hot milk softens the bread evenly, but adding eggs while it is still very hot can scramble them, leaving lumps instead of a smooth, set custard-like pudding.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, beef, lemon, mace, rose):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, beef, lemon, mace, rose. 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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