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Dessert

Wigwam Pudding

A pudding made with stale cake, orange pieces, custard, and meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Wigwam Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Layer the stale cake pieces in a pudding dish in a log cabin style.

  2. Add pieces of orange on top of the cake.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks with cornstarch and sugar.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling milk and let it boil briefly.

  3. Flavor the custard with lemon or orange, then pour it over the cake.

Top and serve

  1. Whip the egg whites to make a meringue and brown it slightly.

  2. Serve the pudding cold with cream.

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

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 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. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale cake
Forms the base layers that soak up the custard and hold the pudding's structure.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Cornstarch
Stabilises the custard so it thickens without becoming grainy.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that softens the cake and sets into a creamy texture.
Egg whites
Whipped into a meringue that adds light texture and gentle browning on top.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture into the boiling milk and let it boil briefly. Egg yolks thicken through heat, but overheating or boiling too long can scramble them and make the custard grainy. Adding the yolk mixture gradually keeps it smooth. Cornstarch also needs a brief boil to reach full thickness.

Swap the orange

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

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

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