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Dessert

Date Pudding

A sweet pudding made with dates, suet, bread crumbs, sugar, eggs, milk, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and cinnamon work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 283 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Date Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Chop the suet and dates very finely.

  2. Mix in the powdered cinnamon, sugar, eggs, and milk.

Cook

  1. Place the mixture in a buttered basin and tie it in a cloth.

  2. Boil for three 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. Dates + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together283 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Dates + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Dates
Add sweetness and moisture, and a rich, caramel-like flavour as they cook.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding body so it holds together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, giving structure.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the crumbs and eggs combine into a soft batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and supports the flavour of the dates and spice.

The step that matters

Boil for three hours. A long, steady boil cooks the eggs and crumbs through and softens the suet evenly. Cooking it too briefly leaves the centre wet and dense, so the full time matters.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Datesthe original

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

More date pudding recipes

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