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Dessert

Muffin or Cabinet Pudding

A steamed pudding made with muffins, custard, dried cherries, and served with wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Muffin or Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the muffins in half.

  2. Pour boiling milk over the muffins.

  3. Let them cool.

  4. Butter a mold.

Make the custard

  1. Make a custard by beating the egg yolks and whole eggs with cream, brandy, sugar, nutmeg, and grated lemon peel.

Assemble and cook

  1. Layer dried cherries and custard with muffins until full.

  2. Boil the mold in a steamer with water for 1½ hours.

  3. Serve with wine sauce.

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

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and bind the muffins into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Egg yolks
Add richness and smoothness to the custard through their fat and emulsifying power.
Muffins
Form the bread base that soaks up the custard and gives the pudding its body.
Cream
Adds fat for a rich, tender custard texture.
Milk
Softens the muffins and forms the liquid base for the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the richness of the eggs and cream.

The step that matters

Steaming the mold. Steam heats the custard gently and evenly. If the water boils too hard or the mold is sealed poorly, the custard can curdle or turn spongy and watery.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, cream, brandy, sugar, nutmeg, 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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