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Dessert

Newmarket Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sponge cakes, custard, raisins, mixed peel, currants, and topped with red‑currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,180 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, creamy. The science ↓

Newmarket Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Make a custard by whisking together the eggs, sugar, and milk.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Slice the sponge cakes and layer them in a well-buttered mold.

  2. Between the layers, add the raisins, mixed peel, and currants.

  3. Pour the custard over the layered sponge cakes.

Steam and serve

  1. Cover the mold and steam gently for 1 hour.

  2. Warm the red-currant jelly and pour it over the pudding just before serving.

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

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

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard so it binds the sponge layers into a soft, tender pudding.
Sponge cakes
Form the body of the pudding, soaking up custard as it steams.
Milk
Makes up the liquid of the custard, keeping the pudding moist as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds to the pudding's flavour.
Muscatel raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and fruit flavour between the layers.
Red-currant jelly
Adds a glossy, tart-sweet glaze over the finished pudding.

The step that matters

Steam gently. Gentle steam heats the custard until it just sets. Boiling or fierce heat can make the eggs curdle and the texture grainy or watery.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, 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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