Skip to main content
Main

Cottage Potato Pudding

A baked pudding made from mashed potatoes, milk, sugar, eggs, salt, nutmeg, and optional currants or raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,052 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cottage Potato 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 the potatoes

  1. Rub the mashed potatoes through a colander.

  2. Heat the potatoes with the milk until smooth.

Mix and bake

  1. Stir in the sugar, beaten eggs, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Add currants or raisins if desired.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 45 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. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

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

  2. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

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

  3. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Nutmeg + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Form the bulk of the pudding and give it a soft, starchy body.
Eggs
Set when baked, binding the mixture into a custard-like pudding.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the potato into a smooth, pourable mixture.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and a faint molasses flavour that suits the potatoes.

The step that matters

Heat the potatoes with the milk until smooth. Cooking the potato and milk together gives an even, lump-free base. Lumps left in will not smooth out once the eggs are added and baked, so the texture of the finished pudding depends on this step.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, milk, sugar, egg, 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes