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Puddings

A steamed pudding made with treacle, orange peel, apple, marmalade, currants, and suet paste, served plain or with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Line small teacups with thinly rolled suet paste.

  2. In a bowl, mix treacle, orange peel, orange juice, grated apple, marmalade, nutmeg, and currants.

Fill and steam

  1. Fill the cups with alternate layers of paste and treacle mixture, finishing with paste on top.

  2. Cover with greased paper and steam for about 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Turn out and serve plain or with a sweet 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 + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  2. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Nutmeg + nutstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet paste
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and holds its shape while steaming.
Treacle
Provides the sweetness, dark colour and rich body of the filling.
Orange marmalade
Adds concentrated orange flavour and extra sweetness to the filling.
Grated apple
Adds moisture and soft texture to the filling.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Filling the cups in layers. Packing the paste and treacle mixture evenly without air gaps keeps the pudding dense and moist. Gaps can let steam collect and leave the turned-out pudding uneven or collapsed.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, apple, nutmeg, currant):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, apple, nutmeg, currant. 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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