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Dessert

Rum Pudding

A dessert made from sponge cake soaked in rum, topped with a rum‑flavored icing and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Rum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cake

  1. Cut the sponge cake into slits and pour in the rum.

Make the icing

  1. Make icing by boiling sugar with enough water to melt it until thick enough to string from a spoon.

  2. Slowly pour the hot icing into the beaten egg white while stirring.

Decorate and serve

  1. Decorate the pudding with conserved cherries and blanched almonds.

  2. Serve with whipped cream flavored with rum.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Rum + sugartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Rum + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together313 recipes

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

  4. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 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

Sponge cake
Forms the base that soaks up the rum and gives the pudding its body.
Rum
Adds aroma and flavor and moistens the sponge cake when poured into its slits.
Sugar
Sweetens the icing and, once boiled, thickens into a syrup that sets as it cools.
Egg white
Beaten and combined with hot syrup, it becomes a light, foamy topping that holds its shape.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot icing into the egg white. Pour the syrup slowly while stirring constantly. Hot syrup added too fast can cook the egg white unevenly into lumps, and too little stirring leaves the mixture uneven instead of smooth and glossy.

“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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