Skip to main content
Dessert

Nesselrode Pudding

A chilled almond and chestnut pudding with pineapple, candied fruit, cream, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Almond and chestnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 130 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Nesselrode Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell chestnuts, remove brown skin, and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Press chestnuts through a colander.

  3. Shell, blanch, and pound almonds.

  4. Cut candied fruit into small pieces.

Make the custard

  1. Boil water and sugar together for 20 minutes.

  2. Beat egg yolks until light, then add them to the boiling syrup.

  3. Place saucepan in another pot of boiling water.

  4. Beat mixture with a wire spoon until it thickens.

  5. Remove from boiling water.

  6. Place in a basin of cold water and beat for 10 minutes.

  7. Add fruit, almonds, cream, chestnuts, vanilla, sherry, and salt, mixing well.

Freeze and ripen

  1. Transfer to a freezer.

  2. Freeze.

  3. Once frozen, drain off excess water.

  4. Add more salt and ice.

  5. Cover the freezer.

  6. Let stand for 4 to 5 hours to ripen.

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. Almond + chestnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together130 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pineapple + vanillatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together911 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Chestnut + vanillatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together244 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Almond + vanillatop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pineapple + sherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the syrup into a rich custard base that holds the frozen texture.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the frozen pudding a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and lowers the freezing point, keeping the pudding soft.
Chestnuts
Provide starchy body and a dense, mealy texture to the pudding.
Almonds
Add body, nutty flavor and a fine texture once pounded.
Candied fruit
Adds sweetness, chewy texture and concentrated fruit flavor.

The step that matters

Beating the custard in cold water. Beating the thickened egg mixture while it cools keeps it smooth and aerated; if it is not cooled and beaten enough, the yolks can scramble or the base can freeze into icy, grainy crystals.

Swap the pineapple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, chestnut, cream, egg, vanilla, sherry, wine):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Apricotfits about as well
  3. Strawberryfits about as well
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, chestnut, cream, egg, vanilla, sherry, 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.

You might also like

Pineapple SherbetPineapple Sherbet116 recipesVanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesPineapple PuddingPineapple Pudding72 recipesPineapple CreamPineapple Cream58 recipes