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Dessert

Orange Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with oranges, milk, eggs, sugar, lady's fingers, and boiled in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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

Prepare

  1. Soak the crumbled lady's fingers in cold milk.

  2. Whip the soaked mixture until light.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and sugar, and mix until creamy.

  4. Stir in the cornstarch.

Steam and serve

  1. Butter a mold.

  2. Bring water to a boil.

  3. Add the fruit juice and peel.

  4. Plunge the mold into the boiling water and boil for 1 hour.

  5. Turn out and serve with sweet brandy sauce.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lady's fingers
Absorb the milk and form the soft, bready body of the pudding.
Eggs
Set during steaming to give the pudding its firm, custard-like structure.
Milk
Moistens the lady's fingers and adds creaminess to the custard base.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the sharpness of the citrus.
Oranges
Add fresh citrus acidity and aroma from the juice and grated peel.

The step that matters

Plunge the mold into the boiling water and boil for 1 hour. The water must be at a full boil when the mold goes in, and it must stay steaming for the full hour. Steady gentle heat lets the eggs set evenly without leaving the pudding watery or curdled.

Swap the orange

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

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

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