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Dessert

Frozen Pudding

A chilled dessert made with whipped cream, egg yolks, vanilla, candied cherries, nuts, powdered sugar, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Frozen Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a bowl, cream the egg yolks and powdered sugar together.

  2. Add the vanilla and the candied cherries and nuts.

Fold and freeze

  1. Fold in the whipped cream gently.

  2. Pack the mixture in ice and salt until frozen.

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. Vanilla + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  2. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Vanilla and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Cream
Whipped air gives the frozen pudding a light, airy body.
Egg yolks
Yolks add richness and help bind the mixture into a smooth base.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the base and dissolves easily into the creamed yolks.
Candied cherries and nuts
Add chewy sweetness and crunch against the smooth frozen base.

The step that matters

Fold in the whipped cream gently. Whipped cream holds its air through its trapped bubbles. Vigorous stirring deflates it, so the frozen result turns dense and heavy instead of light.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, vanilla, egg, sugar, sherry, wine):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Cocoafits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, vanilla, egg, sugar, sherry, wine. 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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