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Dessert

Cracker Pudding

A pudding made from soda crackers, milk, suet, raisins, eggs, and salt, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,155 recipes. Both carry decanoic acid, which smells acides aroma. The science ↓

Cracker Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Pour boiling milk over grated soda crackers and cover tightly.

  2. Let sit for 1 hour, then beat the mixture with a spoon until fine.

Mix and cook

  1. Foam the eggs and stir them into the mixture.

  2. Add the shredded suet, pitted raisins, and salt.

  3. Boil for 2½ hours.

  4. Serve with brandy sauce or a 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. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + raisintop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Soda crackers
Soak up the hot milk and thicken the pudding into a soft, cake-like body.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it as it cooks, giving it structure and richness.
Suet
Adds fat that makes the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Seedless raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the crackers and provides moisture for a tender texture.

The step that matters

Beat the cracker mixture until fine. Thorough beating breaks the softened crackers into a smooth, even mass, so the pudding cooks uniformly without lumps or dry pockets.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg. 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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