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Dessert

Prince Albert Pudding

A steamed pudding made with butter, raisins, sugar, eggs, flour, and lined with candied lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 Albert Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the stoned raisins and mix well.

  3. Gently fold in the flour until just combined.

Line and steam

  1. Line a buttered mold with strips of candied lemon peel.

  2. Pour the mixture into the mold and steam for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with 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. Raisin + flourtop 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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Butter
Adds richness and a tender crumb through fat creamed with sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and, creamed with butter, traps air for a lighter texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during steaming.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together once cooked.
Raisins
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy pockets throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. Steaming is gentle, moist heat that sets the batter without browning it. Keep the water at a steady simmer for the full time, since uneven or dry steam leaves the pudding underdone or dense.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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