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Dessert

Neapolitan Pudding

A layered dessert of bread crumbs, sweet milk, lemon, eggs, macaroons, sponge cake, and jam, boiled to a pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Neapolitan Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in sweet milk until smooth.

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter, then add the lemon juice and rind.

  3. Beat the eggs separately; add the yolks to the creamed mixture, then mix in the soaked bread crumbs.

  4. Whip the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture.

Layer and steam

  1. Butter a tin bucket and layer the mixture on the bottom.

  2. Add a layer of macaroons dipped in wine, then cover with more bread mixture.

  3. Add slices of sponge cake spread with jelly or jam, then more bread mixture, repeating layers until full.

  4. Ensure the top layer is bread mixture, cover tightly, and boil for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Carefully turn out and serve with wine 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the custard, while whipped whites lighten the mixture and help it set.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they absorb liquid and form the soft, moist body of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps tenderise the creamed base.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to add richness and a tender crumb.
Macaroons
Soaked in wine, they add moisture and a distinct almond-sweet flavour between layers.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Whites must be whipped until stiff, then folded gently. Overmixing deflates the air they hold, so the pudding turns dense rather than light.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, sugar, butter, egg, wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, butter, egg, wine. 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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