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Dessert

Pig Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with figs, orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Pig Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine base

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water until soft.

  2. Cook the sugar and boiling water to make a syrup.

  3. Pour the boiling syrup over the gelatine.

  4. Stir until the gelatine mixture is dissolved.

  5. Strain the mixture.

  6. Let the strained mixture cool.

Whip and combine

  1. Whip the egg white.

  2. Add the whipped egg white to the whipped cream in a bowl set over ice water.

  3. Stir the gelatine mixture into the whipped cream until it thickens.

Add the figs and chill

  1. Chop the figs.

  2. Cover the figs with lemon juice.

  3. Let the figs sit while preparing the pudding.

  4. Fold the figs into the pudding mixture.

  5. Let the pudding chill on ice until thickened.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + figtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together407 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. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + figtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a soft, sliceable pudding structure as it cools.
Egg white
Whipped to foam, it adds lightness and airy volume to the pudding.
Whipped cream
Adds fat and richness, and gives the pudding a light, creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps balance the tartness of the citrus.
Figs
Add body, sweetness and chewy texture to the set pudding.

The step that matters

Stir the gelatine mixture into the whipped cream until it thickens. Gelatine begins to set as it cools, so if the mixture is too cold or too warm the texture can turn lumpy or fail to thicken evenly. Keeping the bowl over ice and stirring steadily helps it set smoothly while keeping the foam airy.

Swap the fig

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits about as well
  3. Blackberryfits about as well
  4. Figthe original

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