Skip to main content
Dessert

Tansy Pudding

A baked pudding made with tansy, spinach, milk, bread crumbs, butter, brandy, sugar, lemon juice, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Spinach and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Tansy 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. Pound the tansy and spinach leaves together and squeeze out the juice.

  2. Pour boiling milk over the bread crumbs and let it cool.

Make the custard

  1. Add butter, brandy, sugar, lemon juice, and tansy juice to the cooled mixture. Mix thoroughly, then add the beaten eggs.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 45 minutes.

  2. Serve hot, dusted with powdered sugar.

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. Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the pudding into a custard-like structure as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk and give the pudding its body.
Milk
Softens the bread crumbs and adds moisture to the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly in the oven.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour to the pudding.

The step that matters

Add the beaten eggs after the mixture has cooled. Eggs scramble if they meet very hot liquid, which leaves the pudding grainy instead of smooth. Letting the milk and crumbs cool first keeps the eggs tender and helps the custard set evenly in the oven.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, butter, brandy, sugar, lemon, 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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes