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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, bread crumbs, orange marmalade, and sherry, served with a marmalade sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy.

  2. Lightly work in the eggs, then add the bread crumbs and orange marmalade.

  3. Place the mixture in a mold and steam for 45 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, boil the tablespoon of marmalade with the sherry and serve over the pudding.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Orange + sherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together823 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Bread + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together682 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a lighter crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps create a creamy, aerated base when beaten with butter.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help set the pudding as it steams.
Bread crumbs
Provide body and absorb the butter and marmalade to give the pudding its structure.
Orange marmalade
Adds fruit flavour, sweetness and acidity, and its sugar helps moisten the pudding.
Sherry
Adds aroma and depth of flavour to the sauce as it boils.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. Steaming gently and steadily cooks the eggs into a set, moist pudding. If the water boils dry or the steam is too weak, the pudding can turn out heavy or unevenly cooked.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, bread, sherry. 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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