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Dessert

Bishop Whipple Pudding

A baked pudding made with nuts, flour, eggs, dates, baking powder, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pecans and dates share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bishop Whipple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the chopped nuts, flour, baking powder, and sugar.

  3. In another bowl, beat the egg whites and yolks together.

Bake and serve

  1. Combine the egg mixture with the dry ingredients and fold in the chopped dates.

  2. Pour the batter into a biscuit pan and bake until golden.

  3. Break into pieces while hot and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

  4. Serve cold with whipped 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. Pecans + datestop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Nuts + pecanstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together121 recipes

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

  3. Nuts + datestop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Nuts + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set in the oven.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together after baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping it rise and turn light.
Dates
Add moisture and natural sweetness to the baked pudding.
Nuts
Add texture and a toasty flavor, and help the pudding hold together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Pour the batter into a biscuit pan and bake until golden. The batter is thick and mostly dry, so it must bake through until set and golden. Underbaking leaves it gummy in the centre, while overbaking dries it out.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pecans, flour, egg, dates, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Brazil nutfits better
  3. Mixed nutsfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pecans, flour, egg, dates, sugar. 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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