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Dessert

Brown Pudding

A steamed pudding made with eggs, flour, butter, sugar, raspberry jam, magic soda, and sherry.

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

Why it works: Raspberry and sherry work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Brown Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Weigh two eggs and use that weight in flour, butter, and sugar.

  2. In a bowl, mix the sugar and eggs until creamy.

  3. Beat the raspberry jam until smooth and bubbly, then add the flour and Magic Soda.

  4. Combine all ingredients and steam for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, whip the egg yolks and caster sugar in a double boiler with the cooking sherry for 1 minute.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Raspberry + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 batter and add structure as the pudding sets.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch that gives the pudding its body.
Unsalted butter
Adds fat for a rich, tender crumb.
Magic soda
Releases gas to help the pudding rise.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness.

The step that matters

Whip the sauce over a double boiler. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot, so gentle heat over simmering water and constant whisking are needed to thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the raspberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Raspberrythe original

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