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Preserve

Stale Cake Pudding

A pudding made from stale cake, eggs, milk, sugar, butter, flour, raisins, spices, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Stale Cake Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the eggs, salt, milk, sugar, melted butter, flour, raisins, stale cake, cinnamon, vanilla, cloves, and baking powder. Mix until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish or a small tin pail, leaving room for it to rise.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the dish in boiling water and boil for three hours or more.

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. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Cinnamon + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  5. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and set the pudding into a firm, sliceable structure as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the body that holds the cake crumbs and raisins together in the pudding.
Stale cake
Soaks up the liquid and gives the pudding its tender, cake-like crumb.
Butter
Adds richness and a soft texture to the finished pudding.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the pudding rises and stays light.

The step that matters

Leave room for the pudding to rise. Baking powder releases gas as the batter heats, so the pudding expands. A full dish can overflow or cook unevenly, so the batter must have space above it.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, sugar, butter, flour, cinnamon, vanilla):

  1. Raisinthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Peachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, sugar, butter, flour, cinnamon, vanilla. 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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