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Dessert

Brighton Pudding

A steamed pudding made with potato flour, milk, eggs, lemon rind, dried cherries, raisins, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Brighton Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a pudding mold.

  2. Decorate the mold with cherries and raisins.

Make the custard

  1. Mix the potato flour with a small amount of milk.

  2. Pour the boiling milk and lemon rind over the flour mixture, stirring continuously.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into the prepared mold.

  2. Cover with buttered paper.

  3. Steam for 1½ hours.

  4. Serve with jam 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Potato flour
Thickens the milk mixture so it sets into a soft, tender pudding.
Eggs
Set during steaming to give the pudding its structure and richness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the eggs set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Stirring the boiling milk into the flour. Adding the boiling milk while stirring constantly keeps the starch dispersed, so it thickens evenly without lumps. Stopping the stirring can leave lumps or an uneven texture.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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