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Noodle Pudding

A baked dish of boiled noodles mixed with eggs, sugar, almonds, lemon peel, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Noodle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour into a bowl and make a cavity in the center.

  2. Break 4 eggs into the cavity, then add salt and water to the eggs.

  3. Stir the eggs slowly with a knife until combined.

  4. Knead the dough on a floured surface until smooth.

  5. Divide the dough into 4 parts and roll each part out thinly.

  6. Let the rolled dough dry.

  7. Cut the dried dough into ½-inch wide strips.

Cook the noodles

  1. Boil water in a kettle and add salt to the boiling water.

  2. Cook the noodles for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  3. Drain the noodles in a colander and rinse them with cold water.

Assemble and bake

  1. Beat 8 to 10 eggs and mix them with the drained noodles.

  2. Grease a flat-bottomed iron kettle with goose fat.

  3. Layer noodles in the kettle, sprinkling sugar, almonds, lemon peel, and raisins between layers.

  4. Continue layering until all ingredients are used.

  5. Bake for 2 hours.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + raisintop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the dough's structure once kneaded and rolled into noodles.
Eggs
Bind the dough and coat the noodles, giving richness and set structure when baked.
Goose fat
Greases the kettle and adds richness and browning to the pudding's surface.
Raisins
Add sweetness and moist, chewy pockets between the noodle layers.

The step that matters

Let the rolled dough dry before cutting. Dough that is still moist sticks together and tears when cut into strips and cooked. Drying firms the sheets so the noodles hold their shape in the boiling water and the pudding.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, sugar, almond, raisin. 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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