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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A sweet pudding made with lemon, sugar, arrowroot, wine, and candied rind, steamed or boiled for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ¼ cup of water gently with the thin rind of ½ lemon and 1½ ounces of sugar for about 10 minutes.

  2. Remove the lemon peel and stir in 1 teaspoon of arrowroot mixed smoothly with the strained juice of the lemon.

  3. Take the sauce off the heat and add ½ cup of brandy or ⅓ cup of sherry, adjusting the arrowroot if using wine.

Decorate and cook the pudding

  1. Line a mold with small leaves of citron rind and split muscatel raisins in a pattern.

  2. Fill the spaces with cleaned and dried currants mixed with plenty of shredded candied orange or lemon rind.

  3. Combine the pudding mixture with 1 egg yolk when cold, then steam or boil for two 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 lemon sauce into a smooth, glossy consistency as it cooks.
Egg yolk
Binds the pudding mixture and adds richness and structure once cooked.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the lemon syrup and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour to the sauce; added off the heat so its alcohol and aroma stay.

The step that matters

Adding the brandy or sherry off the heat. Arrowroot thins when stirred into acidic or alcoholic liquids and can lose its thickening power if overheated. Removing the sauce from the heat before adding the spirit keeps the sauce smooth and preserves the aroma of the alcohol.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, arrowroot, brandy, egg, raisin, orange):

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

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