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Dessert

Dutch Pudding

A yeast-based bread pudding with currants, almonds, and candied peel, baked and served with wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dutch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

  3. Stir in the flour, milk, yeast, currants, sugar, almonds, and candied peel until combined.

  4. Cover the mixture and let it sit in a warm place for 1 to 2 hours.

Bake and serve

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Pour the mixture into a dish or tin, ensuring it is no more than 3 inches deep.

  3. Bake for 1 hour.

  4. Turn out the pudding, sprinkle with sugar, and serve with 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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 add structure and richness as they set.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding as it bakes.
Yeast
Produces gas during the rest, helping the batter rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps hydrate the flour to form the batter.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rest in a warm place. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce gas. Resting too briefly or in a cold spot leaves the pudding dense, so the rise is weak before baking.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, flour, milk, 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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