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Dessert

Italian Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with biscuits, macaroons, candied peel, sultanas, nuts, eggs, cream, rum, and a rum sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and pistachio share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Italian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding mixture

  1. Crush the sweet biscuits and macaroons together.

  2. Mince the candied peel, sultanas, and pistachio nuts or almonds.

  3. In a bowl, combine the crushed biscuits, minced ingredients, egg yolks, egg whites, cream, and rum. Mix thoroughly.

Cook the pudding

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

  2. Cook in a bain-marie for about 1 hour.

Make the rum sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix sugar, rum, grated lemon peel, and essence of vanilla in an enameled saucepan.

  2. Heat the mixture until hot.

  3. Ignite it and extinguish the flame by covering the saucepan.

  4. Add the orange juice.

  5. Strain the sauce before serving.

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. Biscuit + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Pistachio + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together431 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Biscuit + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and set the pudding into a tender, creamy structure.
Egg whites
Add lightness and help the pudding rise and hold its structure as it cooks.
Sweet biscuits
Provide the crumb base that gives the pudding body and absorbs the liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the pudding a softer, smoother texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and sauce and helps form a syrupy sauce base.
Rum
Adds aroma and flavour in both the pudding and the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the pudding in a bain-marie. Gentle, indirect heat from the water bath keeps the egg-rich mixture from overheating, which would make it curdle, scorch or turn rubbery. Keep the water below a hard boil.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, pistachio, egg, cream, rum, sugar, sauce):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, pistachio, egg, cream, rum, sugar, sauce. 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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