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Dessert

Nesselrode Pudding

A chilled chestnut cream pudding with raisins, currants, and maraschino, served with a boiled cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and raisin share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 65 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Nesselrode Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Peel the chestnuts and boil them for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove the second skin and cook slowly with 1 cup of sugar until tender.

  3. Drain and press through a fine sieve.

Make the custard and fruit

  1. In a saucepan, combine the egg yolks, ¼ pound of sugar, and 1 pint of boiled cream.

  2. Stir over low heat until thickened.

  3. Add the chestnut puree and strain into a basin.

  4. Stir in 1 tablespoon of maraschino.

  5. In a separate pot, cook the raisins, currants, ½ cup of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of water until done.

  6. Drain and let cool.

Freeze and serve

  1. Pour the chestnut cream into a freezer and partly freeze it.

  2. Fold in ½ pint of whipped cream, the raisins, and currants.

  3. Close the freezer and place it in ice and salt for 2 hours to finish freezing.

  4. For the sauce, stir together ½ pint of boiled cream, 4 egg yolks, and 1 small cup of sugar over low heat until thickened.

  5. Strain and add 1 tablespoon of maraschino.

  6. Turn the pudding out of the mold.

  7. Pour the sauce around it.

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. Chestnut + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

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

  5. Chestnut + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Provide the main body and flavour of the pudding when cooked and pureed.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and enrich the texture through their setting proteins.
Boiled cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the custard a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.
Whipped cream
Lightens the frozen mixture with trapped air for a softer, less icy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and softens the chestnuts, and helps keep the frozen texture smooth.
Raisins and currants
Add chewy sweetness and fruity bite against the smooth frozen cream.

The step that matters

Partly freezing the chestnut cream before folding. If the base freezes fully before the whipped cream and fruit are folded in, they cannot mix evenly and the texture becomes lumpy. Stopping at a partly frozen, spoonable stage keeps the mixture smooth and airy.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chestnut, sugar, egg, cream, raisin. 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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