Skip to main content
Main

Pease Pudding

A boiled split pea pudding made with butter, egg, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Peas and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,887 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pease Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Soak the split peas in cold water overnight.

  2. Drain the peas.

  3. Tie them loosely in a cloth, allowing room to swell.

  4. Place the cloth in a saucepan of cold water and boil for 2½ hours until soft.

  5. Remove the cloth.

  6. Mash the peas through a fine sieve.

  7. Add the butter, egg, and seasoning to the mixture.

Shape and boil

  1. Dip a pudding cloth in boiling water.

  2. Flour the cloth.

  3. Wrap the mixture tightly like a ball.

  4. Put the pudding in a pan of fast boiling water and boil quickly for 1 hour.

  5. Remove the cloth.

  6. Serve on a hot dish.

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. Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Peas + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,065 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Form the main body of the pudding, setting into a soft, mashable mass when cooked.
Butter or dripping
Adds fat and richness, giving the pudding a softer texture and smoother mouthfeel.
Egg
Helps bind the mashed peas so the pudding holds together when cooked and sliced.

The step that matters

Wrap the mixture tightly like a ball. The cloth must be snug so the pudding keeps its shape while boiling; a loose wrap lets water soak in and the pudding fall apart.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Filbertfits about as well
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg. 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.

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes