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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A sweet pudding made by boiling water, lemon rind, sugar, arrowroot, and wine, then steaming with egg yolk and dried fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil water with lemon rind and lump sugar for 10 minutes.

  2. Remove lemon peel and stir in arrowroot mixed with lemon juice and optional orange juice.

  3. Take sauce off heat and add brandy or sherry, adjusting arrowroot if needed.

Assemble and cook

  1. Arrange citron rind and raisins in a mold, filling spaces with currants and candied rind for decoration.

  2. Add the cooled pudding mixture and one egg yolk, then steam or boil for 2 hours.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Brandy + curranttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Arrowroot + raisintop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce when heated.
Egg yolk
Enriches and helps bind the pudding mixture.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the lemon's acidity.
Brandy or sherry
Adds aroma and flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the brandy or sherry off the heat. Alcohol added to a boiling sauce can evaporate or change its flavour, and the arrowroot thickening may need adjusting, so the sauce should be removed from heat first.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, arrowroot, brandy, egg, raisin, currant):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Raspberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, arrowroot, brandy, egg, raisin, currant. 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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