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Arrowroot Pudding Made with Prepared Invalid Food

A pudding made with arrowroot, sugar, egg, nutmeg, and prepared food, baked after boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 159 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Pudding Made with Prepared Invalid Food

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the pudding base

  1. Mix the arrowroot with a little cold water.

  2. Add the prepared food to the mixture while stirring.

  3. Return the whole mixture to a saucepan and boil for 3 to 4 minutes.

  4. Add the sugar and nutmeg, then beat the egg and add it to the mixture.

Bake

  1. Pour into a buttered dish and bake at 300°F (150°C).

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. Arrowroot + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Nutmeg + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Nutmeg + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Nutmeg and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Arrowroot
Starch that thickens the liquid into a smooth, set custard when boiled.
Egg
Adds richness and helps the pudding set and hold its shape as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild flavour of the pudding.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm aroma to the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the arrowroot mixture for the full 3 to 4 minutes. Arrowroot thickens when its starch granules swell and burst in boiling liquid. Stopping early leaves the mixture thin and the pudding may fail to set properly in the oven.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootthe original
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Spinachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, sugar, egg. 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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