Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A sweet pudding made with milk, sugar, bread crumbs, eggs, brandy, lemon rind, and optional currants and candied orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a large bowl, combine the milk, sugar, salt, bread crumbs, eggs, brandy, and lemon rind. Mix well until all ingredients are combined.

  2. If desired, fold in currants and thinly sliced candied orange peel.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding cloth or mold.

  2. Boil for 1 hour and 10 minutes in a pot of water.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Brandy + curranttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

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

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 help it set as it cooks into a firm pudding.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the liquid and give the pudding its body and soft texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the bread crumbs soak up and that sets with the eggs.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to the pudding's flavour.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture into a pudding cloth or mold. The mixture must be sealed or enclosed so it holds its shape and does not leak into the boiling water, while leaving room for the pudding to expand slightly as it cooks.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, bread, egg, brandy, lemon, orange):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, bread, egg, brandy, lemon, orange. 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.

More boiled pudding recipes

Paste 5Plain 5 See all 71 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes