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Dessert

Plasmon Cabinet Pudding

A steamed pudding made with stale cake, plasmon, milk, egg, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 368 recipes. Both carry maltol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Plasmon Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cake, biscuits, or bread into dice shapes.

  2. Sprinkle the plasmon over the diced bread and place it in a buttered pudding mold.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg, then add the milk, sugar, and nutmeg and mix well.

  2. Pour the mixture into the mold.

  3. Let it stand for 30 minutes to soak.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for 1.5 hours.

  2. Serve with jam 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. Biscuit + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together368 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Biscuit + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Biscuit + milktop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Stale cake, biscuits, or bread
Provides the body of the pudding, soaking up the milk and egg mixture to set into a soft crumb.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that moistens the bread and, with the egg, forms the custard.
Plasmon
Adds protein-rich milk solids that help thicken and enrich the custard texture.
Egg
Sets the custard as it steams, binding the pudding together.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the egg and milk.

The step that matters

Letting it stand to soak. The bread needs time to absorb the liquid before steaming; without soaking, dry pockets remain and the pudding can set unevenly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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