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Chestnut Pudding

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Chestnut Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the Italian chestnuts until tender.

  2. Pass the chestnuts through a potato masher.

  3. In a pudding dish, create a layer of meringue by beating egg whites with powdered sugar.

  4. Cover the top with the mashed chestnuts.

  5. Heap whipped cream around the edges of the dish.

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

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

  2. Chestnut + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Chestnut + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together643 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Swap the chestnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Chestnutthe original
  4. Pecansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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