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Dessert

The Cambridge Pudding

A boiled pudding made with eggs, sugar, flour, raisins, and suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

The Cambridge Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs with sugar and flour until smooth.

  2. Add the raisins and chopped fat or suet.

  3. Butter a mold and pour in the pudding mixture.

Cook

  1. Tie it tightly in a cloth and boil for 5 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set to give the pudding its structure as it cooks.
Flour
Provides starch that thickens the batter and gives the pudding body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning and flavor development.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and gives it a rich, tender texture.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth tightly before boiling. A loose cloth lets water seep into the pudding, making it soggy and diluting its texture and flavor. A tight seal keeps the batter compact and moist during the long boil.

“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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