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Dessert

Kind of Fruit Jam

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet or butter, fruit jam, sugar, and lemon rind and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Kind of Fruit Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Mix flour with suet or butter to form a paste.

  2. Spread a layer of fruit jam over the paste.

Roll and wrap

  1. Sprinkle fine brown sugar on top, then add the grated lemon rind and juice.

  2. Roll the paste carefully and pinch the ends to seal.

  3. Wrap in a cloth and secure the ends.

Boil

  1. Boil the pudding for 1 to 2 hours, depending on size and ingredients.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the paste that holds the filling together during boiling.
Suet or butter
Adds fat to the paste, giving it a tender, rich texture.
Fruit jam
Provides concentrated sweetness and fruit flavour that cooks into the filling.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma from the rind and juice, brightening the sweet filling.
Fine brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture to the filling.

The step that matters

Roll the paste carefully and pinch the ends to seal. If the roll has gaps or loose ends, the filling can leak out into the cloth and water during boiling, leaving the pudding dry and messy.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, flour, butter, sugar):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

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