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Dessert

Bishop Whipple Pudding

A baked nut and date pudding with eggs, flour, sugar, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and dates work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 178 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bishop Whipple 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 the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, mix the chopped nuts, flour, baking powder, and sugar.

  3. In another bowl, beat the egg yolks and whites together.

  4. Combine the egg mixture with the dry ingredients and fold in the chopped dates.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a biscuit pan and bake until golden.

  2. Break into pieces while hot and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

  3. Serve cold with whipped cream.

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. Nuts + datestop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Nuts + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 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. Flour + datestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 add structure and moisture as the pudding sets.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together after baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the pudding rises and becomes lighter.
Chopped dates
Add moisture and sweetness, softening the texture of the baked pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Fold in the chopped dates gently after combining the egg mixture with the dry ingredients. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour and deflates the beaten eggs, producing a tough, dense pudding instead of a light, tender one.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Mixed nutsfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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