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Dessert

Canary Pudding

A sweet pudding made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and lemon zest, served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Canary Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter without allowing it to oil.

  2. Add the sugar and finely minced lemon zest.

  3. Gradually add the flour while stirring the mixture well.

  4. Whisk the eggs and add them to the pudding mixture, beating until thoroughly blended.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold or basin.

  2. Boil for two hours.

  3. Serve with sweet sauce.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds richness and a tender, moist crumb to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps give it a soft, tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during cooking to give the pudding structure.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.

The step that matters

Melt the butter without allowing it to oil. If butter overheats and separates, its fat and milk solids split, so the batter can turn greasy and fail to blend smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, flour, sauce. 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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