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Dessert

Sweet Panada

A sweet bread pudding made with water, nutmeg, lemon peel, wine, sugar, bread crumbs, and optional currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweet Panada

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Combine 1 pint of water, grated nutmeg, grated lemon peel, and wine in a saucepan.

  2. Add sugar to taste and bring to a boil.

  3. Stir in bread crumbs and boil rapidly until the mixture is clear and thick.

Finish and serve

  1. Optionally, add a few currants before serving.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Wine + curranttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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

Bread crumbs
Absorb the liquid and thicken the mixture into a pudding as they cook.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the pudding and rounds out the wine and lemon flavours.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly after adding the bread crumbs. Bread crumbs need enough heat and steady boiling to swell and thicken the liquid. If the mixture is not boiled hard enough, it stays thin and fails to reach the clear, thick texture the recipe describes.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, lemon, wine, sugar, bread. 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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