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Dessert

Potato-flour Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with potato flour, milk, cinnamon, lemon peel, sugar, eggs, wine, and marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Potato-flour Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Boil the cinnamon, lemon peel, and sugar in the milk; strain.

  2. Mix the potato flour with a little cold milk until smooth; stir into the milk mixture until nearly cold.

Bake

  1. Add the beaten eggs, sweet wine or spirits, and marmalade; mix well.

  2. Bake in a Dutch oven until set.

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 mixture into a soft, smooth custard as it cools.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the pudding its firm, sliceable structure.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the eggs set.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the flavour of the citrus and spice.
Marmalade
Adds sweetness, citrus flavour and a little acidity to the custard.

The step that matters

Stir the potato flour mixture into the milk until nearly cold. Potato flour thickens as it heats and must be fully dispersed first, or it clumps. Stirring it in while the milk is still cooling helps it thicken evenly rather than lumping or setting too thick before the eggs are added.

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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