Name: Cabinet Pudding
Ingredients: 3 or 4 penny sponge cakes; raisins; butter (for greasing); rich custard

Why it works: Raisin and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,630 recipes. Both carry decanoic acid, which smells acides aroma. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

3 or 4 penny sponge cakes
raisins
butter (for greasing)
rich custard

Directions

Prepare the mold

Cut the sponge cakes into squares.
Grease a mold with butter and line it with raisins.

Assemble and steam

Place the sponge cake squares in the mold, adding more raisins.
Pour the rich custard over the cake and raisins.
Steam the pudding for 1.5 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.

Raisin + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,630 recipes

Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

What each ingredient does

Sponge cakes: Form the bulk of the pudding and soak up the custard as it steams.
Rich custard: Provides moisture and richness, setting into a soft, tender texture when steamed.
Raisins: Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.

“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.