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Dessert

Prince Alberts Pudding

A steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, raisins, and optional spices.

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

Prince Alberts Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Gradually mix in the pounded sugar until well combined.

  3. Add the yolks of the eggs, then the whisked egg whites, mixing thoroughly.

  4. Gently fold in the sifted flour.

  5. Stir in the stoned raisins last.

Boil and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a well-buttered mold or floured cloth.

  2. Boil the pudding for 3 hours.

  3. Serve with punch sauce and garnish with candied peel if desired.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + flourtop 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).

Butter and flour 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

Fresh butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give the pudding a rich, tender body.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the butter hold air when beaten in.
Eggs
Add structure as they set and lift the batter through their whisked whites.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch that sets and gives the pudding its body once boiled.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Folding in the flour. Once the whisked egg whites are in, overmixing or stirring hard knocks out the air they hold, so the pudding turns heavy. Fold gently and only until the flour disappears.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, flour, raisin):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, 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.

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