Skip to main content
Preserve

Modern Cookery

A boiled pudding made with milk, suet, bread crumbs, raisins, orange rind, eggs, and salt.

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

Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in boiling milk.

  2. Mix in the minced suet, raisins, salt, and orange rind.

  3. Add the eggs, omitting one white, and combine well.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for 2 hours.

  2. Serve with a very sweet sauce, without adding sugar.

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Melts during boiling, enriching the pudding and keeping it moist and tender.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, giving the pudding structure.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the boiling milk and help give the pudding a soft, light body.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for 2 hours. Steaming or boiling must be kept at a steady simmer with enough water, since a sudden drop in heat or boil-dry pot can leave the eggs and suet unevenly set and the pudding dense or scorched.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, raisin, egg):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, raisin, 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.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes