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Dessert

Marshmallow Pudding

A gelatin-based dessert made with egg whites, sugar, and flavored with fruit or nuts.

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

Why it works: Vanilla and nuts work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 638 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Marshmallow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water for 15 minutes.

  2. Pour boiling water over the gelatine and stir on the stove until dissolved.

Make the mixture

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff and dry, then gradually add the sugar.

  2. Once the gelatine is cool, beat it into the egg mixture gradually.

  3. Divide the mixture and color half pink or green if desired.

Set and serve

  1. Layer the mixture with nuts, cherries, or any fruit in a mold lined with oil paper.

  2. Set the mold in ice to ripen.

  3. Serve with sweetened and flavored 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.

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. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Vanilla + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

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

  5. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture into a firm, sliceable pudding structure.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they give the pudding its light, airy, marshmallow-like texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and stabilizes the whipped egg white foam.

The step that matters

Cooling the gelatine before folding it into the egg whites. If the gelatine is still hot, it can deflate the whipped egg white foam and prevent the mixture from becoming light. Cooling it until just cool keeps the foam intact while it sets.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, vanilla, cream. 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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