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Marrow Pudding

A baked pudding made with crumbled bread, boiled milk, marrow, raisins, currants, eggs, lemon peel, nutmeg, and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg 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 ↓

Marrow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. In a mug, combine the crumbled bread and pour the boiling milk over it. Cover and let it sit for 1 hour.

  2. Mix the marrow, raisins, currants, beaten eggs, lemon peel, nutmeg, and brown sugar into the soaked bread and milk.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a baking dish.

  4. Optionally line the dish with puff pastry.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

  2. For a Dutch oven method, cover the dish and place it over a slow fire for an additional 15 minutes.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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 into a custard-like pudding structure when baked.
Bread
Soaks up the hot milk and gives the pudding its soft, absorbent body.
Milk
Hydrates the bread and provides moisture that keeps the pudding tender.
Marrow
Adds richness and fat that enriches the texture of the pudding.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy pockets throughout the pudding.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper caramel note to the pudding.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread in boiling milk. The bread must fully absorb the hot milk for the full hour so the pudding bakes evenly and does not turn out dry or lumpy. Eggs added to hot bread need to be well mixed so they set smoothly rather than curdling into streaks.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, raisin, egg, lemon, nutmeg, sugar. 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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