Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A boiled pudding made with almonds, egg yolks, egg whites, powdered sugar, bread crumbs, lemon rind, butter, and apricot marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Almond and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Butter the pudding mold.

Fill and cover

  1. Layer the pudding mixture into the mold.

  2. Cover the mold with buttered paper or tie a cloth securely around it.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for a full hour.

  2. Serve with German or common sweet wine 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. Almond + apricottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + apricottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Bind the mixture and add richness and a tender, custardy texture.
Egg whites
Add lightness and help the pudding rise and hold its structure.
Bread crumbs
Provide bulk and body that soak up the eggs and butter.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a moist, tender crumb.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the pudding and dissolves easily into the batter.

The step that matters

Cover the mold securely. Boiling pudding is cooked in water or steam, so the mold must be sealed tightly. A loose cover lets water seep in, which makes the pudding soggy and heavy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, egg, sugar, bread, butter, apricot):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, egg, sugar, bread, butter, apricot. 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.

More boiled pudding recipes

You might also like