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Dessert

Potato Pudding

A baked dish of mashed potatoes, cream, eggs, sugar, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Potato Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, combine the mashed potatoes and boiled cream.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks and add them to the mixture.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, then fold them into the potato mixture.

  3. Stir in the sugar and grated lemon peel or flavoring.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake for 1 hour.

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

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

  2. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  3. Potato + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,481 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 + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

Potatoes
Provide the bulk and starchy body that gives the pudding its soft, tender crumb.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the pudding smooth and tender as it bakes.
Eggs
Set the pudding during baking, and the whites add lightness through their whipped structure.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the baked pudding a golden surface.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Egg whites hold air when beaten to stiff peaks. Folding gently keeps that air in the mixture, so the pudding rises and bakes light instead of dense.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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