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Dessert

Potatoe-Flour Pudding

A baked pudding made with milk, cinnamon, lemon peel, sugar, potato flour, eggs, sweet wine or spirits, and marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Potatoe-Flour Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Boil cinnamon, lemon peel, and sugar in milk.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Mix potato flour with a little cold milk until smooth.

  4. Stir the potato flour mixture into the milk until nearly cold.

Bake

  1. Add beaten eggs, sweet wine or spirits, and marmalade.

  2. Bake in a Dutch oven.

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. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Potato flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set pudding texture.
Eggs
Add structure and help the pudding set as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the thickener and eggs set into custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the spices and wine.

The step that matters

Stir the potato flour mixture into the milk until nearly cold. Potato flour thickens as it heats, so adding it to hot milk can cause lumps. Letting the mixture cool nearly to cold before adding the eggs keeps the eggs from scrambling and helps the custard set smoothly.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cinnamon, lemon, sugar, flour, egg, wine):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, lemon, sugar, flour, egg, wine. 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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