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Dessert

Victoria Pudding

A suet and jam pudding flavored with lime, cooked for three hours and served with a jam and brandy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Victoria Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA very quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the suet, jam, lime juice, grated peel, sugar, eggs, and salt thoroughly.

  2. Place the mixture in a buttered mold.

Boil the pudding

  1. Boil for three hours.

Make and pour the sauce

  1. Mix 2 teaspoons of flour with ½ ounce of butter for the sauce.

  2. Add 1 cup of boiling water and stir in 1 tablespoon of jam, lime juice, and 1 tablespoon of brandy.

  3. Simmer for five minutes.

  4. Mix in a small pat of butter and strain.

  5. Pour over the pudding.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Lime + buttertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the pudding its set structure.
Jam
Provides sweetness and fruity flavor throughout the pudding and sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds moisture to the batter.
Lime juice
Adds acidity and bright citrus aroma that balances the sweetness.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling water to the flour and butter. Flour must be smoothly blended with the butter before the hot water goes in, and the liquid stirred well. Otherwise starch clumps into lumps instead of thickening the sauce evenly.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, butter. 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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