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Dessert

Orange Pudding

A gelatin-based dessert made with orange juice, pulp, peel, lemon juice, sugar, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the orange layer

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in ½ cup of cold water.

  2. Add ⅓ cup of boiling water, 1 cup of sugar, the juice of 1 lemon, 1 cup of orange juice and pulp, and the grated peel of 1 orange. Mix well.

  3. Place in a cold area or on ice.

Make the custard and combine

  1. For the custard, beat the yolks of 3 eggs with 3 tablespoons of sugar.

  2. Stir this mixture into 1 pint of boiling milk.

  3. Cook over boiling water until it thickens.

  4. When the orange mixture begins to set, gently stir in the beaten whites of 3 eggs.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a soft, sliceable structure as it cools.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they add a light, airy texture to the set mixture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk into a custard when gently cooked, adding richness.
Orange juice and pulp
Provides the main orange flavour and acidity, plus some moisture and body.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg whites at the right moment. Fold the beaten whites in only when the gelatine has just begun to set. If it is too liquid, the whites deflate and the pudding loses its airy lightness; if it is too firm, they will not blend evenly.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Blueberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, egg, milk. 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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