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Dessert

Nursery Pudding

A rhubarb dessert thickened with arrowroot, sweetened with brown sugar, served chilled with milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rhubarb and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Nursery Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stew the rhubarb with the brown sugar until soft.

  2. Moisten the arrowroot with cold water.

  3. Stir the moistened arrowroot into the boiling rhubarb.

Serve

  1. Serve cold with milk or cream.

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. Rhubarb + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Rhubarb
Provides the tart flavour and the bulk of the pudding's body as it softens.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses-like depth that balances the rhubarb's sourness.
Arrowroot
Thickens the juices into a glossy, set pudding when heated.

The step that matters

Stirring the moistened arrowroot into the boiling rhubarb. Arrowroot must be mixed into a slurry first and added to boiling liquid so it thickens evenly; dumped in dry or added to cool fruit, it clumps and stays starchy.

Swap the rhubarb

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, arrowroot, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Rhubarbthe original
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, arrowroot, milk. 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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