Skip to main content
Dessert

Prune Pudding or Whip

A baked pudding made from prunes, sugar, lemon juice, nutmeg, and stiffened egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon 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 ↓

Prune Pudding or Whip

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 the prunes

  1. Wash, soak, and cook the prunes until tender.

  2. Remove the seeds and chop the prunes finely.

  3. Add sugar, lemon juice, and nutmeg to the chopped prunes and mix well.

Make the meringue

  1. Beat the egg whites until very stiff, adding cream of tartar while beating.

  2. Carefully combine the prune mixture with the egg mixture without beating.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the mixture in a greased pudding pan and cover it.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes, removing the cover for the last 15 minutes.

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

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

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Nutmeg + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Nutmeg and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg whites whipped to foam give the pudding its light, airy structure as it sets.
Prunes
Provide the bulk, moisture and dark fruity flavour of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the whipped egg whites.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the egg whites, stabilising the foam so it holds its volume.

The step that matters

Folding the prune mixture into the egg whites. Stirring or beating after the whites are stiff knocks out the air they hold, so the pudding bakes up dense rather than light. Combine gently, using a folding motion.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, sugar, egg, cream. 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 prune pudding recipes

Norwegian 7Steamed 5 See all 210 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes