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Dessert

Royal Pudding

A sweet bread pudding with currants, raisins, spices, and wine, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Royal 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

  1. Prepare the ingredients the day before and cover them tightly.

  2. Boil the milk and pour the hot milk over the grated bread.

  3. Cover and let steep for 1 hour.

  4. In the meantime, pick, soak, and dry the currants.

Make the custard

  1. Crush the sugar with the butter until well combined.

  2. Once the bread mixture is cool, mix in the butter, sugar, spices, citron, and white wine.

  3. Beat the eggs until very light and gradually stir them into the mixture.

  4. Dredge the raisins and currants with flour, then fold them into the mixture.

  5. Stir everything together vigorously.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2 hours.

  3. Serve warm with wine sauce or a mixture of wine and sugar.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the pudding and set it into a soft, custardy structure as it bakes.
Stale bread
Soaks up the hot milk and forms the body of the pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the bread and keeps the pudding moist.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Currants
Add chewy sweetness and fruity bursts throughout the pudding.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and concentrated fruit flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs gradually. Beating the eggs until light and stirring them in slowly lets them blend evenly. Adding them all at once or to a hot mixture can cause uneven setting or lumps in the custard.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, currant, raisin, nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, currant, raisin, nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar. 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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