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Dessert

Washington Pudding

A sponge cake topped with a butter, sugar, and wine sauce, blanched almonds, and served with cream, wine, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Washington Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cake

  1. Bake a sponge cake in a mold until done.

Finish and serve

  1. While the cake is very hot, spread hard sauce made from butter, sugar, and wine over it.

  2. Allow the sauce to melt and soak into the cake.

  3. Split the blanched almonds into four pieces and stick them on top of the cake.

  4. Serve the cake as hot as possible with cream, wine, and sugar.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  5. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sponge cake
Forms the base of the dish, soaking up the warm sauce to become moist.
Hard sauce
Melts into the hot cake, adding richness and moisture through the crumb.
Cream
Served alongside, adding richness and a cool, smooth contrast to the warm cake.
Wine
Flavours the hard sauce and is served with the cake for aroma and mild acidity.

The step that matters

Spread the sauce while the cake is very hot. Hot cake is porous and warm enough for the butter in the hard sauce to melt and soak in. If the cake has cooled, the sauce sits on the surface instead of penetrating the crumb.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits less well
  4. Cashew nutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, butter, sugar, wine, 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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