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Dessert

Porcupine Pudding

A cake made with sugar, flour, eggs, baking powder, milk, topped with blanched almonds, custard, and jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Porcupine 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, flour, eggs, baking powder, and milk until smooth.

  3. Pour the batter into a round tin and bake until golden.

Decorate and serve

  1. Frost the top and sides of the cake thickly.

  2. Stick blanched almonds into the top of the cake with points up.

  3. Prepare a floating island and place the cake on a glass stand.

  4. Pour a little custard around the edge of the stand.

  5. Drop a little jelly on each spot of custard.

  6. Serve the remaining custard as a 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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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
Bind the batter and give the cake structure as they set in the oven.
Flour
Forms the gluten network and sets the crumb of the cake.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown to a golden color.
Custard
Adds a creamy, rich sauce that complements the sponge cake.

The step that matters

Bake until golden. Underbaking leaves the centre wet and collapsed, while overbaking dries the sponge. Baking powder needs the heat of the oven to lift the batter, so the cake should be checked for set structure and colour before it is removed.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Milletfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Hazelnutfits less well

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

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