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Dessert

Diplomatic Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with grated bread, marrow, sugar, flour, raisins, currants, candied peel, eggs, milk, lemon rind, and cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Diplomatic Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Mix grated bread, marrow, sugar, and flour in a basin.

  2. Boil milk with grated lemon rind.

  3. Pour the hot milk over the mixture in the basin.

  4. Cover and let stand for about 10 minutes.

  5. Add prepared fruit, stoned raisins, and chopped candied peel.

  6. Beat eggs until very light. Mix the beaten eggs thoroughly into the pudding mixture.

Steam and serve

  1. Butter a pudding mold and dust it with fine sugar.

  2. Decorate the bottom of the mold with a few cherries or other candied fruits.

  3. Pour the pudding mixture into the mold. Cover with buttered paper and steam for 2 hours.

  4. Serve with syrup sauce made from lemon juice.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set the pudding structure as it steams.
Grated bread
Forms the body of the pudding and absorbs the hot milk.
Milk
Soaks into the bread to moisten the pudding and carry the lemon flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the crumb a tender finish.
Marrow
Adds richness and fat, softening the texture of the pudding.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs until very light. Well-beaten eggs trap air and add lift, and mixing them in thoroughly keeps the custard evenly set rather than streaked or dense after steaming.

Swap the currant

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

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

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