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Marrow Pudding

A pudding made with raisins, beef marrow, eggs, flour, sugar, and salt, boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Marrow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and stone the raisins.

  2. Chop the beef marrow into large pieces.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs until smooth.

  2. Add salt, flour, and sugar to the eggs and mix well.

  3. Combine the egg mixture with the raisins and marrow using a wooden spoon.

Cook

  1. Transfer the mixture to a well-buttered basin or mold.

  2. Cover tightly with a cloth and boil gently for 4 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Raisins
Provide sweetness and chewy texture in the finished pudding.
Beef marrow
Adds richness and fat that keeps the pudding moist as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during cooking to give the pudding its structure.
Flour
Thickens the egg mixture so it holds together rather than turning watery.

The step that matters

Covering and boiling gently. The pudding must be sealed tightly and simmered gently for the full time. Steam from a covered mold cooks it evenly, while a hard boil can make the eggs curdle and the texture rubbery or cracked.

“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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