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Dessert

Sponge Pudding

A chilled sponge pudding made with cherries, angelica, cream, biscuits, ratafia, eggs, and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Angelica and biscuit share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 69 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sponge Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Butter a quart mold thickly.

  2. Decorate it with the dried cherries and preserved angelica.

  3. Layer the sponge biscuits and ratafia in the mold, sweetening with sugar if desired.

Make the custard

  1. Flavor the mixture with vanilla.

  2. Beat 2 egg whites and 2 or 3 egg yolks together.

  3. Warm and strain the cream.

  4. Add the cream to the egg mixture.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into the mold.

  2. Steam for an hour or more, covering the top with buttered paper.

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. Angelica + biscuittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together69 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Angelica + vanillatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together170 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  4. Biscuit + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together422 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  5. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, binding the pudding into a firm, sliceable body.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the custard a soft, smooth texture.
Sponge biscuits
Absorb the custard and give the pudding its light, tender crumb structure.
Ratafia
Soak up custard and add a sweet, almond-like aroma through the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam gently for an hour or more, with buttered paper on top. Gentle, steady steam cooks the egg custard evenly so it sets without curdling or turning rubbery. The buttered paper stops the top from drying out and forming a crust.

Swap the angelica

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Angelicathe original
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, biscuit, egg, sugar, vanilla. 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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