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An English Potato-pudding

A baked potato pudding with butter, sugar, eggs, and a red currant jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and port wine work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

An English Potato-pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes until soft, then skin and mash them with a spoon.

  2. Pass the mashed potatoes through a fine sieve.

Make and cook the pudding

  1. Add melted butter, sugar, and beaten eggs to the potatoes and mix well.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a well-buttered mold and cover with a wet cloth.

  3. Boil for 30 minutes, then carefully turn out onto a plate.

Finish with the glaze

  1. In a small saucepan, heat red currant jelly, port wine, and hot butter together, then pour over the pudding.

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. Red currant + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  4. Potato + red curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together69 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the pudding, giving it a soft, moist body once mashed and sieved.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm when cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and carries flavour through the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly at the surface.
Red currant jelly
Adds a tart, fruity glaze that sets on the pudding's surface.

The step that matters

Covering and boiling the mold. The wet cloth keeps steam from drying the surface, and the gentle boil cooks the eggs through without curdling or toughening them. Too hot a boil can make the pudding rubbery.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, red currant, port wine):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, red currant, port wine. 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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