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Dessert

Quaker Pudding

A bread pudding made with buttered bread, raisins, milk, eggs, and a cherry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Quaker Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the layers

  1. Spread nice bread with butter.

  2. Boil the raisins.

  3. Layer bread and raisins in a dish.

  4. Pour the water from the boiled raisins over the layers.

  5. Add 1 quart of milk and 5 beaten eggs.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  2. Boil cherry juice, sugar, and flour mixed in a little water for 8 minutes.

  3. Strain the 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Bind the milk and bread together and set into a custard as they bake.
Milk
Provides the liquid that soaks the bread and forms the custard with the eggs.
Bread
Forms the structure of the pudding, soaking up the custard as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cherry sauce and adds body to it.
Flour
Thickens the cherry juice into a sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the cherry juice, sugar, and flour. Flour thickens only when the mixture reaches a full boil and is stirred so it does not lump. Cooking it for the full 8 minutes lets the starch swell fully, giving a smooth, properly thick sauce.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

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