Skip to main content
Dessert

Birds' Nest Pudding

A baked apple pudding with a batter of eggs, flour, milk, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Birds' Nest 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 the apples

  1. Core the apples.

  2. Peel the apples.

  3. Place the apples in a dish.

  4. Fill the cores with sugar and nutmeg.

  5. Cover the dish.

  6. Bake the apples.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks until light.

  2. Mix the flour and baking powder into the yolks.

  3. Add the milk and salt to the batter.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the apples.

  2. Bake for 1 hour at 350°F (175°C).

  3. Serve with sauce.

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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, folded in beaten, lighten it for a airy texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding batter together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the heat, helping the batter rise and become light.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour into a pourable batter.
Apples
Soften as they bake and add moisture and sweetness to the pudding.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites.. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites intact. Stirring or deflating them makes the batter dense and reduces the rise the whites provide.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, nutmeg, egg, flour, milk. 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

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes