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Dessert

Fig Pudding

A steamed pudding made with figs, bread crumbs, suet, eggs, molasses, and lemon, served with a butter-sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fig Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix figs, bread crumbs, brown sugar, suet, eggs, lemon rind and juice, molasses, nutmeg, and flour well.

  2. Place the mixture in a steaming bag.

  3. Steam for 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a sauce made of creamed butter and sugar, flavored with a few drops of lemon extract.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Fig + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together510 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Fig + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together374 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Figs
Provide the main fruit flavor and chewy, moist body in the pudding.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding its soft, cake-like structure.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as it cooks.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavor.

The step that matters

Steam for 3 hours. Steaming gently and steadily cooks the eggs and crumbs through without drying the pudding. Letting the water boil dry or lowering the heat too far can leave the centre undercooked or the texture uneven.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fig, bread, sugar, egg, molasses, nutmeg, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fig, bread, sugar, egg, molasses, nutmeg, flour. 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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