Skip to main content
Dessert

Iced Pudding a LA Shakspeare

A chilled dessert made from cream, egg yolks, sugar, caramel, citrus, and dried fruits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Iced Pudding a LA Shakspeare

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. In a saucepan, combine 4 ounces of sugar, cinnamon, lemon rind, and ½ cup of water; boil until dark brown, then dilute with ½ cup of water and strain.

Make and freeze the base

  1. In a bowl, mix the cream, egg yolks, 8 ounces of sugar, caramel essence, and curaçao.

  2. Freeze the mixture until firm.

Finish and serve

  1. Fold in the dried fruits and whipped cream.

  2. Mold the ice and embed it in rough ice and salt.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cinnamon + peartop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Cinnamon + pistachiotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together201 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + pistachiotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together431 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and help the base set smooth and creamy when frozen.
Cream
Provides fat and body, giving the frozen pudding a rich, soft texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice from freezing rock-hard.
Whipped double cream
Adds air and lightness, softening the texture of the frozen dessert.
Dried fruits
Add chewy texture and concentrated fruit flavour throughout the frozen pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the caramel until dark brown. Sugar darkens and develops bitter, toasted flavours as it caramelises; stopping too early gives a weak flavour, while overcooking can make it bitter. Diluting with water carefully controls the syrup's strength.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, egg, sugar, cinnamon, lemon, orange, pistachio):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, sugar, cinnamon, lemon, orange, pistachio. 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