Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweet Potato Pudding

A baked sweet potato pudding with butter, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, lemon peel, topped with marmalade and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sweet potato and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the sweet potato until thoroughly done.

  2. Mash the boiled sweet potato finely.

  3. While the potato is hot, add the sugar and butter.

  4. Set the mixture aside to cool.

  5. Beat the eggs until light.

  6. Add the grated nutmeg, lemon peel, and the cooled potato mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Line tin plates with puff pastry.

  2. Pour the mixture into the lined plates.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  4. Once removed from the oven, cover the tops with thinly sliced preserved citron or quince marmalade.

  5. Sprinkle the tops thickly with granulated sugar.

  6. Serve with rich milk.

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. Sweet potato + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Sweet potato + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together314 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + quincetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potato
Forms the bulk of the filling and gives it a soft, moist body when mashed.
Eggs
Set when baked, binding the mashed filling into a firm, sliceable custard-like texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the filling a smoother, more tender mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps browning on the sugared top.

The step that matters

Let the potato mixture cool before adding the eggs. Beaten eggs added to very hot mixture can begin to scramble or cook unevenly, so cooling the potato first keeps the filling smooth and lets it set evenly in the oven.

Swap the quince

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, sugar, butter, milk, nutmeg, lemon, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, sugar, butter, milk, nutmeg, lemon, egg. 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.

More sweet potato pudding recipes

Carolina 3 See all 116 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesQuince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipesDeep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipes