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Dessert

Nesselrode Pudding

A pudding made with chestnuts, almonds, candied fruits, pineapple, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 130 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Nesselrode Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Shell the chestnuts and remove the brown skin.

  2. Cover the chestnuts with boiling water and cook for 20 minutes.

  3. Rub the cooked chestnuts through a colander.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, boil the sugar and water for 15 minutes.

  2. Beat the egg yolks lightly and gradually stir them into the boiling syrup. Remove from heat as soon as it reaches boiling point.

  3. Beat until cold.

Combine and freeze

  1. Add the fruits, nuts, minced pineapple, cream, and sherry.

  2. Freeze the mixture as you would ice 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. Chestnut + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together130 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pineapple + sherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  4. Chestnut + pineappletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  5. Almond + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together428 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Give the pudding its base body and a starchy, sweet, nutty flavour.
Almonds
Add nutty flavour and a fine, rich texture to the mixture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the syrup into a custard and add richness and structure.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving a smoother, creamier texture after freezing.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers the freezing point, keeping it soft.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks to the syrup. Egg yolks scramble if the syrup is too hot or they are added too quickly. Stir them in gradually and remove the pan from heat as soon as it reaches boiling point, so the mixture thickens smoothly.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chestnut, almond, sugar, egg, cream, sherry. 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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