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Dessert

Marrow Pudding

A baked pudding made with boiled milk, stale bread crumbs, shredded marrow, raisins, currants, spices, and optional brandy, lemon peel, almonds, and candied citrus.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Marrow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Pour boiling milk over stale bread crumbs in a bowl and cover with a plate.

  2. Mix shredded marrow, raisins, currants, soaked bread, sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

  3. Lay puff pastry around the edge of a shallow pudding dish and mark it neatly.

Bake

  1. Pour the pudding mixture into the dish.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 25 to 30 minutes.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh marrow
Provides richness and fat, giving the pudding its moist, luxurious texture.
Stale bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they absorb liquid and bind the mixture into a soft, tender body.
Milk
Hydrates the bread crumbs and adds moisture so the pudding sets softly as it bakes.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture as their sugars concentrate slightly during baking.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit sweetness and small chewy pockets throughout the pudding.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, raisin, currant, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, raisin, currant, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg. 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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