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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding

A baked custard pudding made with raisins, milk, eggs, grated bread, sugar, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,781 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the basin

  1. Remove the pits from the raisins and butter a basin.

  2. Stick the raisins all over the inside of the basin.

Make and cook the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix the milk, eggs, grated bread, sugar, chopped almonds, and flavoring to make a thick custard.

  2. Pour the custard into the basin over the raisins.

  3. Boil for 1.5 hours.

  4. Turn out the pudding; the raisins will be on the outside.

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. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Form the decorative outer layer and add sweetness and chewy texture.
Eggs
Set the custard so the pudding holds its shape when turned out.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the eggs and bread set into a custard.
Finely grated bread
Thickens the custard and gives the pudding body and a soft crumb.

The step that matters

Sticking the raisins to the basin. The raisins must be pressed firmly against the buttered basin before the custard goes in, because they form the outer surface and will only stay in place if they are set in position first.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

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