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Dessert

Cocoa-nut Pudding

A pudding made from grated coconut, milk, breadcrumbs, sugar, cherries, and a coconut sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Cocoa-nut Pudding

Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cocoa-nut Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Break off the shells and peel the brown skin from the cocoa-nuts; grate the white part finely.

  2. In a basin, combine half of the grated cocoa-nut, ¾ cup of milk, breadcrumbs, lemon rind, sugar, and chopped cherries.

  3. Beat the butter with the eggs, then add 1 cup of milk and mix with the dry ingredients until well combined.

  4. Pour the mixture into a pudding basin and tie a floured cloth over it.

  5. Place the basin in a saucepan of boiling water and boil for 2½ to 3 hours, keeping it covered with water.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, boil the remaining grated cocoa-nut with 1 cup of caster sugar and ½ pint of water for 10–12 minutes, then strain.

  2. In the saucepan, mix 1 teaspoon of arrowroot with ½ pint of milk and stir over heat until thickened and boiling.

  3. Add the cocoa-nut liquid and boil again.

  4. Remove from heat and quickly stir in the beaten yolk of an egg.

Serve

  1. Once the pudding is cooked, turn it onto a hot dish, sift caster sugar over it, pour the sauce around, and serve.

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. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Cocoa + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Cocoa + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together643 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Nuts + arrowroottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cocoa-nuts
Provide the main flavour and the grated body of the pudding.
Breadcrumbs
Add bulk and soak up moisture, giving the pudding a soft, cake-like crumb.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during steaming to give structure.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, tenderising the crumb.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce to a smooth, glossy consistency.

The step that matters

Quickly stir in the egg yolk off the heat. Egg yolk thickens through gentle heat. Adding it to a boiling sauce and stirring quickly before it can scramble keeps the sauce smooth rather than grainy.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cocoa, milk, lemon, sugar, butter, egg, arrowroot):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cocoa, milk, lemon, sugar, butter, egg, arrowroot. 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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