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Dessert

Cake Pudding

A baked cake made with flour, lard, eggs, currants, lemon peel, sugar, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Cake Pudding

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cake Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat a large pot of water to boiling.

  2. Rub the lard into the flour and baking powder in a bowl.

  3. Add sugar, currants, and lemon peel, mixing well.

  4. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl and add them to the mixture.

  5. Add a little milk to form a very stiff paste.

Cook

  1. Transfer the mixture to a well-greased basin.

  2. Boil for at least 3 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding once mixed with liquid and boiled.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the pudding rises and becomes lighter.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add richness and structure as they set.
Lard
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, giving a tender, crumbly texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning and flavour.

The step that matters

Forming a very stiff paste. Too much milk makes the batter loose, so the pudding can turn heavy and soggy rather than holding its shape. Keeping the paste stiff lets it hold together in the basin while it steams.

Swap the currant

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

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

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