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Dessert

Biscuit Pudding

A pudding made by soaking grated biscuits in warm milk, then baking with sugar, flour, spices, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 889 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Biscuit Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Heat the cream or milk until warm.

  2. Pour it over the grated biscuits and let it cool.

  3. Add the powdered sugar, flour, orange-flower or rose-water, mace or cinnamon, egg yolks, egg whites, and salt. Mix well.

Cook and serve

  1. Butter a basin and dust it with flour.

  2. Pour the mixture into the basin and boil for one hour.

  3. Sift fine sugar over the pudding and serve with melted butter.

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. Biscuit + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Biscuit + orangetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together371 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Cream + biscuittop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Naples biscuits
Form the bulk of the pudding, soaking up the warm cream to give it body.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set firm when cooked.
Egg whites
Add lightness and help the pudding rise and hold its structure.
Cream or whole milk
Provides moisture and richness, softening the biscuits into a custard base.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the liquid mixture.
Flour
Thickens the mixture slightly and adds structure to the set pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for one hour. The mixture must cook through gently and steadily so the egg proteins set into a firm, sliceable pudding rather than remaining runny or curdling at the surface.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, biscuit, sugar, flour, orange, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, biscuit, sugar, flour, orange, 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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