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Dessert

Iced Pudding, a LA Princess Alice

A chilled walnut and green‑gage ice pudding garnished with almond cakes and a preserved cherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Iced Pudding, a LA Princess Alice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnut ice

  1. Remove the skins from the green walnuts and pound them with sugar until a soft paste forms.

  2. Mix the walnut paste with single cream and pass it through a sieve.

  3. Freeze the walnut‑cream mixture.

Prepare the green-gage ice

  1. Boil the green‑gages with sugar and water until dissolved.

  2. Rub the boiled green‑gages through a sieve.

  3. Freeze the green‑gage mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. Line a pudding mold with the green‑gage ice.

  2. Fill the center of the mold with the walnut‑cream ice.

  3. Cover the mold.

  4. Immerse it in rough ice until ready to serve.

  5. Turn the pudding out onto a dish.

  6. Garnish with almond cakes filled with whipped cream and a preserved cherry on top.

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. Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  5. Walnut + creamtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Green walnuts
Provide the main flavour and body of the walnut cream ice once pounded into a paste.
Single cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the frozen walnut mixture a smooth, creamy texture.
Green-gages
Supply the fruit flavour and tartness of the outer layer of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens both mixtures and lowers their freezing point, keeping the ices soft rather than rock-hard.

The step that matters

Passing the walnut paste through a sieve. Pounded walnuts can leave fibrous, gritty bits. Sieving the cream mixture removes them so the frozen ice stays smooth on the palate.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream, almond. 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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