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Dessert

Cream Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with cream, spices, eggs, almonds, and flavored with orange flower or rose water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Cream Pudding

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard base

  1. Boil the cream with mace, cloves, and nutmeg; let it cool.

  2. Beat the eggs, strain, and mix with flour, almonds, and orange-flower or rose-water.

  3. Gradually mix this into the cream and stir well.

Boil and serve

  1. Wet and flour a thick cloth, pour in the mixture, tie it, and plunge into boiling water.

  2. Boil for 30 minutes.

  3. Carefully turn it onto a dish, sprinkle with fine sugar, and serve with pudding sauce.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard, giving the pudding its firm, sliceable body as they cook.
Cream
Provides richness and a smooth, moist texture in the finished pudding.
Fine flour
Thickens the mixture slightly and helps it hold together when boiled.
Blanched almonds
Add body and a nutty flavour, with fat that enriches the texture.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth firmly and keep it fully submerged while boiling. Loose wrapping lets water seep in and dilute the custard, while a gap lets the pudding swell unevenly. Keeping the cloth under a steady boil cooks the egg mixture evenly so it sets rather than turning watery or cracked.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, clove, nutmeg, egg, flour, almond, orange):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, clove, nutmeg, egg, flour, almond, orange. 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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