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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding No. 1

Cabinet Pudding No. 1 is a steamed fruit and almond pudding made with English muffins, milk, cream, eggs, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding No. 1

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a mold well.

  2. Make a layer of thinly cut muffins, then a layer of fruit and almonds, repeating until all ingredients are used.

Make the custard

  1. Beat together the milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and egg yolks.

  2. Pour the mixture over the contents of the mold and let it stand for at least 15 minutes.

Steam and serve

  1. Set the mold in a saucepan with boiling water, reaching two-thirds up the sides of the mold.

  2. Steam for 1 hour.

  3. Carefully turn out onto a dish and serve with Cream 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. Almond + apricottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Milk + apricottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

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

  4. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard, binding the milk and cream into a sliceable pudding.
Egg yolks
Add richness and smoothness to the custard, helping it set softly.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the eggs set.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the custard a smooth, tender texture.
English muffins or rolls
Soak up the custard and provide the bread structure of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the richness of the cream and eggs.

The step that matters

Steam for 1 hour. Steam gently and keep the water below a hard boil. Egg custard that cooks too fast becomes grainy, watery, or full of holes instead of set and smooth.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, egg, sugar, almond. 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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