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Dessert

Nesselrode Pudding

A custard pudding with raisins, pecans, almonds, and maraschino cherries, flavored with vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nesselrode Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Combine 3 pints of milk, 5 egg yolks, 1 cup of sugar, and 3 tablespoons of flour in a saucepan to make a boiled custard.

  2. Remove the custard from the heat and flavor with vanilla.

Add the fruit and freeze

  1. Add 1 pint of rich milk and 3 beaten egg whites to the cooled custard.

  2. Fold in 1 pound of raisins, ½ pound of pecans, ½ pound of almonds, and ¼ pound of chopped maraschino cherries with juice when the mixture begins to freeze and is stiff enough to hold up fruit.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

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

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pecans + almondtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together431 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness through their emulsifying proteins.
Flour
Thickens the custard as its starch swells when heated, giving body to the base.
Egg whites
Beaten whites trap air, lightening the texture of the frozen mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture by lowering the freezing point.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness among the frozen custard.
Pecans
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor that contrasts the creamy base.

The step that matters

Folding in the fruit. Fold the fruit in only when the mixture is partly frozen and stiff. If it is still liquid, the raisins, nuts and cherries sink; if it is too firm, they will not distribute evenly.

Swap the pecans

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Pecansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, flour, raisin, almond. 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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