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Dessert

Another Way to Make Orange Pudding

A custard-like dessert made with Seville orange juice, skins, eggs, sugar, butter, and baked in puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Another Way to Make Orange Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cut the oranges in half and squeeze out the juice.

  2. Strain the juice and set it aside.

  3. Boil the orange skins in a large pot of water until soft.

  4. Pound the softened skins in a mortar.

Make and bake

  1. In a bowl, mix the pounded skins with the egg yolks, egg whites, sugar, orange juice, and melted butter.

  2. Line a baking dish with puff pastry and pour the mixture in.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Orange + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,301 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and help the pudding set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Egg whites
Add structure and lightness, helping the pudding set as it bakes.
Seville oranges
Provide the juice and pounded peel that give the pudding its bright, bitter citrus flavour and aroma.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the bitterness of the orange peel.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, softer texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the orange skins until soft. Skins that stay firm will leave a tough, bitter texture after pounding and baking. They must be fully softened so they blend smoothly into the custard-like mixture.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, butter. 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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