Skip to main content
Main

Marrow Pudding

A pudding made with raisins, beef marrow, eggs, flour, sugar, and salt, boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Marrow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and stone the raisins.

  2. Chop the beef marrow into large pieces.

  3. In a bowl, beat the eggs until smooth, then add salt, flour, and sugar.

  4. Mix the egg mixture with the raisins and beef marrow using a wooden spoon.

Cook

  1. Transfer the mixture into a well-buttered basin or mold.

  2. Tie a cloth tightly over the basin.

  3. Boil gently for 4 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef marrow
Melts during cooking to add richness and a moist, tender body to the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, giving the pudding its firm structure.
Raisins
Add pockets of concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Flour
Adds a little body that helps the eggs and marrow hold together when set.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 4 hours. A gentle simmer cooks the eggs evenly and sets the pudding without splitting or toughening it. A hard boil can force water into the basin and make the texture rubbery, so keep the water at a steady, low bubble for the full time.

“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

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes