Skip to main content
Dessert

Pudding, Apple and Brown Bread

A steamed pudding made with brown bread, apples, raisins, suet, milk, flour, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Pudding, Apple and Brown Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the brown bread with the suet, raisins, beaten egg, milk, flour, and salt.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

  3. Steam for 2 hours.

  4. Serve with lemon 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Apple + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

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

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the milk and egg as it steams.
Egg
Binds the mixture and sets it into a firm, sliceable pudding as it cooks.
Milk
Moistens the bread so the pudding stays soft rather than dry.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and richness of the pudding.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of moisture throughout the pudding.
Chopped apples
Add fruit flavour, tartness and moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Steaming for 2 hours. Steam heat cooks the pudding gently and evenly. If the water boils dry or the mold is sealed poorly, the pudding can turn out dense, wet or unevenly cooked, so the pot needs steady water and a tight lid.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, egg, milk, raisin. 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

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipes