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Dessert

Biscuit Pudding

A baked dessert made with broken biscuits, milk, sugar, eggs, raisins, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and raisin work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Biscuit Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Boil a piece of lemon rind in the milk to flavor it.

  2. Grate the rest of the lemon and mix it with the biscuit crumbs.

  3. Pour the boiling milk over the biscuit mixture.

Mix and bake

  1. Add sugar, raisins, and lemon juice.

  2. Beat the eggs.

  3. Add the beaten eggs when the mixture has cooled.

  4. Bake for 1 hour in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C).

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. Biscuit + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Biscuit + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set into a custard-like texture as it bakes.
Broken biscuits
Form the body of the pudding, soaking up the milk to become soft and tender.
Milk
Provides the liquid that soaks the biscuits and sets with the eggs into a moist custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavor of the lemon.

The step that matters

Add the beaten eggs when the mixture has cooled. If the hot milk mixture is still very hot, it can scramble the eggs instead of letting them blend smoothly, which would leave a grainy texture in the pudding.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, milk, sugar, egg, raisin. 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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