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Dessert

Saxon Pudding

A steamed pudding made with orange rind, sponge cake crumbs, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, lemon juice, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Saxon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the rinds of the oranges until soft, then chop and pound them.

  2. Soak the cake crumbs in hot milk with butter and sugar until cool.

Make and steam the pudding

  1. Beat in the eggs and mix well.

  2. Add the juice of the lemon just before steaming.

  3. Steam in a mold for about 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve hot 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and set during steaming to give the pudding its structure.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, moist crumb.
Sponge cake crumbs
Soak up the milk and add body to the batter.
Milk
Moistens the crumbs and loosens the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the citrus flavor.

The step that matters

Add the lemon juice just before steaming. Acid can thin and curdle a egg batter if it sits too long before heat sets the eggs, so the juice should go in at the last moment.

Swap the orange

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

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

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