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Dessert

Paradise Pudding

A baked pudding made with eggs, bread crumbs, apples, currants, lemon juice, nutmeg, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Paradise Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the eggs in a bowl.

  2. Stir the beaten eggs into the bread crumbs and mix in the minced apples, currants, lemon juice, nutmeg, and salt.

  3. Rub the currants in flour before adding them to the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the mixture for 1.5 hours.

  2. Serve hot with sweet sauce.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it into a firm, sliceable pudding when cooked.
Bread crumbs
Provide the base body that soaks up the liquids and gives the pudding its structure.
Apples
Add moisture and tart flavour, and soften into the pudding as it cooks.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and fruitiness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Rub the currants in flour before adding them to the mixture.. Flour coating helps keep the currants from sinking to the bottom during cooking, so they stay evenly distributed through the pudding.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread, apple, lemon, nutmeg):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, apple, lemon, nutmeg. 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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