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Dessert

Oxford Pudding

A fried biscuit and currant pudding made with suet, sugar, nutmeg, egg yolks, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 368 recipes. Both carry maltol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Oxford Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. In a bowl, mix the grated biscuit, currants, chopped suet, sugar, and nutmeg.

  2. Add the egg yolks and combine until well mixed.

  3. Form the mixture into small balls.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat fresh butter over medium heat.

  2. Fry the balls until they are a light golden color.

  3. Serve with white wine 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. Biscuit + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together368 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  2. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Currant + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Biscuit + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,009 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Biscuit + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Bind the dry ingredients together so the mixture holds its shape.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the balls moist and rich in texture.
Grated biscuit
Forms the bulk of the mixture and gives the balls their body.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the balls.
Butter
Browns the outside of the balls during frying, adding flavour.

The step that matters

Fry the balls until light golden. Medium heat lets the outside colour gently while the centre warms through. Too high a heat browns the surface before the inside is heated, and too low a heat leaves the balls pale and greasy.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, sugar, nutmeg, egg, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, sugar, nutmeg, 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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