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Dessert

Cabinet Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with butter, flour, sugar, raisins, cream, lemon, and eggs, boiled for 2½ hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the sugar and butter together.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks, alternating with the cream and flour.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Dredge the raisins in flour and fold them into the mixture.

Cook

  1. Pour into a well-buttered mold.

  2. Boil for 2½ hours.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Egg yolks enrich the batter and the whites, folded in beaten, lighten its texture.
Butter
Creamed with the sugar, it adds richness and a tender crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as it sets during cooking.
Granulated sugar
Creamed with the butter, it sweetens the pudding and helps give a light texture.
Seeded raisins
Dredged in flour so they stay suspended in the batter, adding chewy pockets of sweetness.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the batter soft and tender.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Beaten whites hold air that lifts the batter. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring hard deflates the foam and leaves a denser pudding.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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