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Exeter Pudding

A boiled endive pudding made with broth, butter, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 47 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Exeter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Wash and boil the endive as in the preceding recipe.

  2. Chop it rather finely and put it into a stewpan with the broth.

Cook and season

  1. Boil over a brisk fire until the sauce is all reduced.

  2. Add the butter, pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg; mix well.

  3. Bring it to the boiling point and serve very hot.

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. Endive + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Endive + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives it its main vegetable flavour and texture.
Broth
Provides the liquid that is reduced to a thick sauce coating the chopped endive.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the reduced sauce.

The step that matters

Boil over a brisk fire until the sauce is all reduced. Reducing the broth concentrates its flavour and thickens it into a sauce that binds the endive. Stopping too early leaves the pudding watery, while over-reducing can make it dry and clumped.

Swap the endive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg. 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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