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Dessert

Oatmeal Pudding

A baked pudding made with oatmeal, milk, bread crumbs, suet, eggs, and sugar, flavored with nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Oatmeal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Mix the oatmeal with ¼ pint of milk.

  2. Add 1 pint of boiling milk and sweeten to taste.

  3. Stir over the heat for 10 minutes.

Finish and bake

  1. Incorporate the bread crumbs until the mixture is stiff.

  2. Add the shredded suet and beaten eggs, along with flavouring or nutmeg.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a buttered dish and bake at 300°F (150°C) for 1 hour.

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  3. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Fine oatmeal
Thickens the milk into a porridge-like base that gives the pudding its body.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and help the mixture firm up to a stiff, sliceable set.
Suet
Adds richness and fat, giving a moist, tender texture as it melts in the oven.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set on baking to give the pudding its final structure.

The step that matters

Stir over the heat for 10 minutes. Stirring keeps the oatmeal from settling and scorching on the base of the pan while its starch swells and thickens the milk evenly. Stopping too early leaves a thin, grainy base that will not set properly in the oven.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

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