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Sweetmeat Pudding

A puff pastry custard with candied citrus peel baked to a golden finish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Sweetmeat Pudding

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Sweetmeat 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

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cover a baking dish with the puff pastry.

  3. Layer the sliced candied lemon peel, orange peel, and citron at the bottom of the dish.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and egg whites together.

  2. Add the sugar, butter, and mace to the eggs and mix well.

  3. Pour the mixture over the sweetmeats in the dish.

Bake

  1. Bake for about 1 hour, ensuring the oven is not too hot.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and help the filling set as it bakes.
Egg whites
Add structure and lightness to the custard-like filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown lightly.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich, tender texture.
Puff pastry
Forms the flaky base that holds the filling.

The step that matters

Keep the oven not too hot. High heat cooks the egg mixture too fast, so it can curdle, toughen, or puff and crack before it sets evenly. Gentle heat lets the eggs set smoothly and the pastry bake through.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, egg, sugar, butter. 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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