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Dessert

Queen Dowagers Pudding

A sweet pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, currants, candied peel, and lemon essence, boiled for 24 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Queen Dowagers Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, flour, currants, candied peel, and lemon essence.

  3. Mix all ingredients thoroughly and beat for 10 minutes.

Cook

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered mold.

  2. Boil the mold for 24 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the pudding a rich, tender body.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set during cooking.
Flour
Provides the starch that sets the batter into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps create a creamy, aerated base with the butter.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit sweetness and chewy pockets throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the mold for 24 hours. Long, steady boiling cooks the batter through gently and evenly. Water must be kept at a steady simmer and topped up, since a drop in heat or boiling dry leaves the pudding undercooked or scorched.

Swap the currant

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

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

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