Skip to main content
Dessert

Date Pudding

A steamed or baked pudding made with dates, raisins, suet, bread crumbs, sugar, spices, flour, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Date Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fruit and dry mix

  1. Combine raisins, dates, chopped suet, bread crumbs, brown sugar, lemon peel, and chopped citron in a bowl.

  2. Add beaten eggs, mixed spices, salt, baking powder, and flour, and mix well.

Make the dough

  1. For the second part, mix fresh dates, suet, moist sugar, flour, a little salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Add enough milk to form a soft dough.

  3. Beat the eggs until stiff, then fold them into the mixture last.

Cook and serve

  1. Steam the pudding for 3 hours or bake at 300°F (150°C) for 2 hours.

  2. Serve with a liquid 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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Dates + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and, when beaten stiff and folded in, add lightness to the pudding.
Suet
Adds richness and fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during cooking.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together once it is cooked.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses flavour, and helps moisture stay in the pudding.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking to make the pudding rise and become lighter.
Dates
Add natural sweetness, chewy texture and moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Folding in the stiffly beaten eggs. Beaten egg whites trap air, and folding gently keeps that air in the batter. Stirring vigorously knocks the air out, leaving a denser pudding.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, bread, sugar, lemon, egg, flour, nutmeg. 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.

More date pudding recipes

Steamed 8 See all 100 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes