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Dessert

Oatmeal Pudding

A pudding made from bread crumbs, oatmeal, suet, milk, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Oatmeal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Soak and mix

  1. Pour nearly boiling milk over the bread crumbs and oatmeal.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Add suet, salt, and nutmeg, then mix well.

Boil

  1. Boil for 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.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and give the pudding a soft, bound body.
Oatmeal
Absorbs liquid and thickens the mixture, giving it a hearty texture.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist as it cooks.
Milk
Softens the bread crumbs and oatmeal and provides moisture for the pudding.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the suet. Suet is solid fat. If the mixture is still very hot, the suet melts and separates instead of staying dispersed through the pudding, which changes the final texture.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Marjoramfits less well
  4. Clovefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, 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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