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Dessert

Royal Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with stale bread, milk, currants, raisins, spices, butter, sugar, wine, and eggs.

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 a day before and cover them tightly.

  2. Boil the milk and pour it hot over the grated bread; cover and let steep for 1 hour.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the butter, sugar, spices, and citron into the bread mixture.

  2. Add the white wine and stir well.

  3. Beat the eggs until light and gradually stir them into the mixture when it is cool.

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

  5. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. 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

Stale bread
Soaked in hot milk, it absorbs liquid and forms the body of the pudding.
Eggs
Set during baking to bind the pudding and give it a custard-like structure.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a tender crumb and smooth texture.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning as the pudding bakes.
Currants and raisins
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness; flouring them helps keep them suspended in the batter.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before adding the eggs. If the bread and milk mixture is still hot when beaten eggs go in, the eggs can scramble rather than blend smoothly, leaving a grainy texture instead of an even, set 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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