Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A boiled pudding flavored with rum, brandy, white wine, citrus, sugar, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine rum, orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, and water.

  2. Add lemon and orange rind.

  3. Heat the mixture until hot, but do not let it boil after adding the rum.

Thicken and cook

  1. In a separate bowl, mix butter and flour until smooth.

  2. Stir the butter mixture into the hot sauce and cook for 14 to 20 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Rum + brandytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

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

  3. Rum + white winetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together113 recipes

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

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Brandy + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together620 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

Rum
Adds the main alcoholic flavour and aroma to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the citrus acidity.

The step that matters

Do not let the mixture boil after adding the rum. Alcohol evaporates and its aroma fades when heated strongly, and boiling can also make the flour-thickened sauce lose smoothness. Keeping it just hot preserves the rum flavour.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rum, lemon, sugar, butter, flour, brandy, white wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pineapplefits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rum, lemon, sugar, butter, flour, brandy, white wine. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes